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BY 

JOHN RUSKIN 



With an Introduction and Explanatory Notes 

By JENNIE E. KEYSOR 

Author of ^'' Stories of Avierican IFrtters" 






EDUCATIONAL PUBLISHING COMPANV 

BOSTON 

New York Chicago San Francisco 






LiBffARY of CONGRESS 

Two Copies Received 

MAH 201906 

Cooyrijrm Entry 

CLASS XXc. No. 

COPY B. 



Copyrighted 

By educational PUBLISHING COMPANY 

1906 



i^eceived fcrorri 
Copyright Office. 



^ 

i CONTENTS 



I. 

PAGE 

Sketch of Ruskin's Life ..... 7 

II. 
Suggestions for Studying tlie Life and 

Writings of John Ruskin ... 19 

IIL 

Sesame : of Kings' Treasuries ... 33 

IV. 

Lilies: of Queens' Gardens .... 109 



PEEFATORY NOTE. 

This book contains the two lectures which 
originally made np the work entitled "Sesame 
and Lilies. " In 1870, when Ruskin revised 
his works for a new edition, he added to this 
volume a lecture delivered in Dublin, in 18(58, 
entitled " The Mystery of Life audits Arts." 
This lecture is omitted in the present volume. 

While it is not desio^ned that the suo^ores- 
tions shall be followed literally, it is hoped 
that they will be, as their name indicates, 
suggestive. 




JOHN BUSKIN 



JOHN EUSKm. 
1819 — 1900. 

"The most distinguished figure in the arena of 
Art-philosophy for lialf a century and more, the 
philantliropist militant, par excellence.** 

— Spielmann. 

John Ruskin, England's greatest art critic, 
was born February 8, 1819, in London. 
That a man, destined to be one of the pro- 
foundest lovers of nature, should have been 
born in smoky, dingy London, seems a 
strange decree of fate. Such was also the 
case with the great landscape painter, Turner, 
to whose defense Ruskin gave a good part of 
his life and mind. 

Ruskin's parents were cultivated Scotch 
people who insisted on all the strict ways for 
which orthodox Scotchmen are noted. The 
father was a member of a large wine firm in 
London and a good business man. Besides 
paying certain debts that were left by his 
father, he accumulated a fair fortune so that 
at his death he was able to leave to his son. 



8 INTRODUCTION. 

the only child, eight hundred thousand 
dollars. 

One thing in particular in the father's busi- 
ness had a marked influence on the boy's 
education. Each summer he took long trips 
into the country, in all directions, takini; 
orders for wine. The son and his mother 
nearly always accompanied him. Their mode 
of conveyance was by carriage and horses 
and there never was any undue haste. The 
father took great pains to point out interest- 
ing objects in the landscape and to discuss 
with his son trees, grass, clouds and other 
interesting natural phenomena. Whenever 
they came to castles of importance they 
always delayed long enough to visit them and 
become somewhat acquainted with their his- 
tory. It is easy to see how such trips as 
these, taken every summer for years, were in 
themselves a liberal education, especially in 
the line Ruskin was to follow out in his 
writings. 

Ruskin's father took great pride in the 
training and cultivation of his son. It is told 
that he left his business punctually every 
afternoon and hurried home that he might 
read to his boy who sat listening, as quiet as 



INTRODUCTION. 9 

a little statue in a niche. Then began those 
readino^s from Sir Walter Scott's works which 
made up such a characteristic part of the 
recreation in the Euskin household. Here, 
too, began that love of Scott which prompted 
Ruskin, in his home at Brant wood, to gather 
toirether the most valuable collection of the 
original manuscripts of Scott's novels any- 
where to be found. Here, too, the English 
poets were read and honored. Ruskin's 
mother had made up her mind to make of her 
son a clergyman and to this end he was com- 
pelled not only to go to church, but he was 
given a strict course in Scriptural study which 
made him familiar with every word. "This 
she eftected," he says, " not by her own say- 
ings or personal authority, but simply by 
compelling me to read the book through for 
myself. As soon as I was able to read with 
fluency, she began a course of Bible work 
with me which never ceased till I went to 
Oxford. She read alternate verses with me, 
watching, at first, every intonation of my 
voice, and correcting the false ones, till she 
made me understand the verse, if within my 
reach, rightly and energetically. It might 
be beyond me altogether ; that, she did not 



10 INTRODUCTION. 

care about : but she made sure that as soon 
as I got hold of it at all, I should get hold of 
it by the right end." 

" In this way she began with the first verse 
of Genesis, and went straight through to the 
last verse of the Apocalypse ; hard names, 
numbers, Levitical law and all ; and began 
again at Genesis the next day. If a name 
was hard, the better the exercise in pronun- 
ciation ; if a chapter was tiresome, the better 
lesson in patience; if loathsome, the better 
lesson in faith that there was some use in its 
being so outspoken." 

''And truly," he goes on to say, "though 
I have picked up the elements of a little fur- 
ther knowledge in mathematics, meteorology, 
and the like, in afterlife, and owe not a little 
to the teaching of many people, this maternal 
instillation in my mind of this property of 
chapters, I count very confidently the most 
precious, and, on the whole, the one essential 
part of all my education." 

No one can read even cursorily, Ruskin's 
works and not be impressed by his numerous 
and apt quotations from the Bible. 

Ruskin's home, though under the strictures 
of a Scotch household, with its wearisome 



INTRODUCTION. 11 

Sabbaths andforbidden pleasures, was a place 
of perfect harmony, the abiding place of 
peace, the delights of which he often blessed 
in his later controversial years. This home 
was transferred in the boy's youth from the 
center of London to Denmark Hill, a suburban 
place open to the sky and the country. 
Ruskin's education was continued by private 
tutors at home and by travel in England and 
on the continent until he was old enough to 
go up to Oxford, which he did in 1836. 

He entered Christ's Church, the favorite 
college of the nobility. He himself tells us 
how proud he was of his velvet gown and 
cap and how he was only an average scholar, 
even to the end of his Oxford days finding it 
impossible to get into his head " where the 
Pelasgi lived, or where the Heraclidee 
returned from." The records show that he 
gained a prize in 1839 for his poem " Salsette 
and Elephanta." The learning he got from 
books was the least part of what he obtained 
at Oxford. All the surroundings — the exqui- 
site architecture of the buildings, the stretches 
of flat country, the companionship of men the 
best his country could afford were all sources 
of inspiration in his work, subjects of happy 



12 INTRODUCTION. 

memories in the long, quiet years after he had 
laid aside his activities. 

A year before he should have graduated 
from Oxford, symptoms of lung disease 
showed themselves and he went to Italy to 
be healed by its sunny climate, and inciden- 
tally, to enjoy its art and sketch bits of won- 
derful buildings. In 1842, he returned and 
took his Bachelor's degree. While in college 
his twenty-first birthday was marked by his 
father sending him a painting by Turner and 
one thousand dollars for pocket-money. He 
at once spent one-third of this sum for an- 
other picture of Turner's. This was in 1840, 
the year in which he met the artist person- 
ally. It was a memorable meeting in the 
light of their later relations — the painter, 
old, smarting under unmerited criticism; 
Ruskin, young, impetuous, even then under 
the spell of Turner's art, anxious to do battle 
in more than knightly fashion for this much- 
criticised, underrated painter. 

That his service was really more than 
knightly was thoroughly proved when, in 
1843, appeared Volume I. of "Modern Paint- 
ers." It was written anonymously by an 
" Oxford Graduate." To the great body of 



INTRODUCTION. 13 

critics it showed conclusively that a new 
and loftier spirit had entered their realm and 
of course there was a great outcry. The 
" Oxford Graduate," however, kept serenely, 
or rather, stormily, on his way, producing 
other volumes until there were five in all. 
Such poignant criticism, couched in such ele- 
gant English, such deification of one artist, 
Turner, such wholesale abuse of masters that 
had previously been considered unassailable, 
all tended to interest the public very much. 
It represented the cream of Mr. Ruskin's 
work for twenty years and stands to-day as 
the greatest monument of his o^enius, thoufi^h 
it failed of its avowed object, to establish 
Turner as the greatest of all painters, ancient 
or modern. It was a gigantic work to thus 
fail and yet we feel that the author puts it too 
seriously when he says, concerning its failure 
and the lack of appreciation for Turner's art 
among people generally, "That was the first 
mystery of life to me." 

From these discourses on painting he turned 
to architecture and produced those brilliant, 
though often erratic books, " Seven Lamps 
of Architecture," " Stones of Venice," " St. 
Mark's Rest," etc. 



14 INTRODUCTION. 

In the meantime he had fallen violently in 
love with a young Scotch woman and married 
her. This experience, he says, " came with 
violence, utterly rampant and unmanageable, 
at least to me, who never before had anything 
to manage." Such a passionate lover is likely 
to be exacting as well, and we know that the 
two were not happy together and separated 
from each other in the course of a few years. 
Kuskin, who always expresses the highest 
regard for women, felt this as a crushing 
sorrow and consequently spent much time 
abroad occupying his mind with the writing 
and illustrating of many of his wonderful art 
books. Years after the separation, the lady 
married the artist, Millais. 

About 1860, Ruskin began to devote him- 
self to political economy and the questions 
that working men are constantly facing. 
"Crown of Wild Olive," next to "Sesame 
and Lilies " his most popular work in Eng- 
land and America, is made up of lectures 
delivered to workingmen. From 1870 to 
1879 Ruskin was professor of drawing at 
Oxford. He and his mother lived here 
together, a most devoted mother and son, and 
here he delivered most of his greatest lectures 



INTRODUCTION. 15 

to crowded audiences, while other able pro- 
fessors spoke to a mere sprinkling of people. 
Ruskin began, however, to feel that it was to 
hear him that the people thronged, and not 
because they were interested in art. So 
keenly did he feel this that he resigned from 
his position. Ruskin was one of the most 
powerful teachers of our century, this not 
alone in his place as professor at Oxford, but 
in the general sense of teaching the world of 
readers. George Eliot said, "I venerate him 
as one of the greatest teachers of the age ; he 
teaches with the inspiration of the Hebrew 
Prophet." 

It was owing to tl nr kindred notions that 
be and Thomas Carlyle became such warm 
friends. Both men were devoted to truth. 
They scorned falsehood and were deeply poig- 
nant in their expressions of deprecation, but 
Ruskin was far more practical than Carlyle. 
What Carlyle would dispose of with an 
expression of cruel satire, Ruskin followed 
up and did something material to relieve the 
condition he deplored. 

A striking illustration of this was his 
founding, near Sheffield, of " St. George's 
Guild," a land-owning society constructed on 



16 INTRODUCTION. 

the principles which he would have all land- 
owners adopt. These as laid down by him 
were : 

"I. To do your own work well, whetner 
it be for life or death. 

"II. To help other people do theirs, when 
you can, and seek to avenge no injury. 

" III. To be sure you can obey good laws 
before you seek to alter bad ones." 

Ruskin's gift to "St. George's Guild" on its 
first Christmas was seven thousand pounds, 
one-tenth of all he then owned. Speaking 
of this gift reminds us of his constant gener- 
osity which was felt by individuals and insti- 
tutions all over England. So prodigal was 
he in his benevolences that the fortune be- 
queathed to him by his father was, at his 
death, reduced to about one-twelfth of its 
original bulk. 

In connection with his various projects for 
improving the condition of the working 
classes, his periodical, Fors Clavigera ( the 
club bearer,) begun in 1871, is exceedingly 
interesting. For eight years it continued, 
giving to the world the author's views on 
everything in general. 



INTRODUCTION. 17 

Raskin's travels in Italy were productive 
of some of his strongest and most valuable 
works. No one has done so much, by accu- 
rate measurements, by drawings and photo- 
graphs, to reveal the beauties of Giotto's 
Tower, the famous Campanile of Florence, 
as John Ruskin. 

The home of Ruskin's old age was Brant- 
wood, on Coniston Lake, in the beautiful 
North of England region. This place he 
bought and improved until it represented an 
investment of five thousand pounds. It was 
an ideally beautiful spot for the aged and 
broken writer to spend his closing years. 
With its fine lake in front and its beautiful 
mountains in the back, it furnished that tran- 
quillity so necessary for him, continually dis- 
turbed as he was by an ever-increasing brain 
trouble. 

The presiding spirit of Brantwood house- 
hold was Joan Agnew, the cousin and adopted 
dauofhter of Ruskin. She afterwards married 
the artist, Arthur Severn, and they continued 
to reside at Brantwood, where their growing 
family relieved the sadness of the master's 
continued decay. The last years at Brant- 
wood were productive of little work on 



18 INTRODUCTION. 

account of Ruskin's extremely delicate health. 
He died elan. 20, 1900. 

His life and fortune were spent to better 
the condition of the working classes of Eng- 
land and to inspire elevated ideas of art and 
life. If, at times, we shrink from his erratic 
expressions, from his almost cruel attacks on 
all that we have been taught to revere in 
art, we must, at the same time, be deeply 
impressed by his sincerity and his courage, 
both of which characteristics stand out boldly 
on that rugged square-cut face which all his 
portraits present. 



INTRODUCTION. 19 



SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDYING THE 

LIFE AND WORKS OF 

JOHN RUSKIN. 

I. Make a careful and comprehensive syn- 
opsis of each essay or work studied. This, 
to be most effective, should be done from 
memory. 

II. Make a brief autobiographical sketch 
of Ruskin gathered from any of his works, but 
especially from " Praeterita : Scenes of My 
Past Life," and "Fors Clavigera." 

HI. Consider the Famous Contemporaries 
of Ruskin. Here is a group of some of 
them : 

W. H. Hunt. William Morris. 

J. E. Millais. E. T. Poynter. 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti . Frederick Leis^hton . 
Professor Church. FrederickWedmore. 

P. G. Hamerton. Professor Jowett. 

G. F. Watts. Alfred Tennyson. 

IV. Make a study of Nature as Ruskin 
treats her. The following references will 
facilitate this work : 



20 INTRODUCTION. 

" A Snow-Drift." — Modern Painters, Yol. 
I., Part 11., Sec. IV., Chap'. II., 19. 

" The Grass."— J/o(7eni Painters, Vol. III. , 
Part IV., Chap. XIV., 49-53. 

" Modem Landscapes." — Modern Painters, 
Vol. III., Part IV., Chap. XVI., 30-45. 

" The Pine Tree."— il/o Jem Painters, Vol. 
v.. Part VI., Chap. IX., 6-11. 

''Y.^x\hr— Modern Painters, Vol. V.,Part 
VI., Chap. I., 3. 

"Character and Mission of Flowers." — 
Modern Painters, Vol. V., Part VI., Chap. 
X.,7. 

" Lichens and Mosses." — Modern Painters, 
Vol. v.. Part VI., Chap. X., 24, 25. 

"Clouds."— ilfocZern Painters, Vol. V., 
Part VII., Chap. IV. 

"An Olive Tree." — Stories of Venice, Vol. 
III., Period III., Chap. IV:, 14-20. 

"The ^ky:'— Modern Painters, Vol. I., 
Part II., Sec. III., Chap. I. 

"Mountains." — Modern Painters, Vol. I., 
Part II., Sec. IV., Chap. I., II. 

V. Have special topics, either written or 
oral, prepared and presented in class. The 
following are some of the subjects that natu- 
rally suggest themselves : 



INTRODUCTION. 21 

1. Ruskin's Defence of Turner. 

2. Natural Beauties of the English Lake 
Region. 

3. Brantwood, Ruskin's Home. 

4. Ruskin's Famous Neighbors. 

5. Ruskin the Student of Nature. 

6. Ruskin as Pupil and Professor at 
Oxford. 

6. Turner's Landscapes. 

8. Ruskin as a Guide to Travellers. 

(Mornings in Florence.) 

9. The Friendship of Ruskin and Carlyle- 

10. Ruskin as a Story Teller. 

11. Ruskin as a Poet. 

12. Ruskin, the Champion of Workingmen. 
yi. Consult as many as possible of the 

following reference books relative to Ruskin 
and his works : 

"The Life and Works of John Ruskin."— 
W. G. Collingivood. 

"John Ruskin." — M. H. iSpielmann. 

"John Ruskin." — Mrs. Meynell. 
(An analysis of the works of Ruskin.) 

"Lessons From My Masters." (Ruskin.) 
— Peter Bayne. 

"Home Life of Great Authors." (Ruskin.) 
—H, T. Grisivold. ' 



22 INTRODUCTION. 

"Pen Pictures of Modern Authors." 
(Ruskin) — Willia7)i Shepard. 

"Life and Teaching of Euskin."— */. Mar- 
shall Mather. 

" A Conversation with Ruskin." — Christian 
Union, May 22, 1884. 



INTRODUCTION. 23 



SELECTIONS FROM THE PREFACE 
OF 1871. 

The first Lecture says, or tries to say, that, 
life being very short, and the quiet hours of 
it few, Ave ought to waste none of them in 
reading valueless books ; and that valuable 
books should, in a civilized country, be within 
the reach of every one, printed in excellent 
form, for a just price ; but not in any vile, 
vulgar, or, by reason of smallness of type, 
physically injurious form, at a vile price. 
For we none of us need many books, and those 
which we need ought to be clearly printed, 
on the best paper, and strongly bound. And 
though we are, indeed, now, a wretched 
and poverty-struck nation, and hardly able 
to keep soul and body together, still, as no 
person in decent circumstances would put on 
his table confessedly bad wine, or bad meat, 
without being ashamed, so he need not have 
on his shelves ill-printed or loosely and 
wretchedly stitched books ; for, though few 
can be rich, yet every man who honestly 



24 INTRODUCTION. 

exerts himself may, I think, still provide, 
for himself and his family, good shoes, good 
gloves, strong harness for his cart or car- 
riage horses and stout leather binding for 
his books. And I would urge upon every 
young man, as the beginning of his due and 
wise provision for his household, to obtain 
as soon as he can, by the severest econ- 
omy, a restricted, serviceable, and stead- 
ily — however slowly — increasing, series of 
books for use through life ; making his little 
library, of all the furniture in his room, the 
most studied and decorative piece ; every vol- 
ume having its assigned place, like a little 
statue in its niche, and one of the earliest and 
strictest lessons to the children of the house 
being how to turn the pages of their own liter- 
ary possessions lightly and deliberately, with 
no chance of tearing or dogs' ears. 

That is my notion of the founding of Kings' 
Treasuries ; and the first Lecture is intended 
to show somewhat the use and preciousness 
of their treasures. 

Since that second lecture was written, ques- 
tions have arisen respecting the education and 
claims of women which have greatly troubled 
simple minds and excited restless ones. I am 



INTRODUCTION. 25 

sometimes asked my thoughts on this matter, 
and I suppose that some girl readers of the 
second lecture may at the end of it desire to 
be told summarily what I would have them 
do and desire in the present state of things. 
This, then, is what I would say to any girl 
who had confidence enough in me to believe 
what I told her, or do what I ask her. 

First, be quite sure of one thing, that, how- 
ever, much you may know, and whatever 
advantages you may possess, and however 
good you may be, you have not been singled 
out, by the God who made you, from all the 
other girls in the world, to be especially 
informed respecting His own nature and char- 
acter. You have not been born in a luminous 
point upon the surface of the globe, where a 
perfect theology might be expounded to you 
from your youth up, and where everything 
you were taught would be true, and every- 
thing that was enforced upon you, right. 

Do not think it, child ; it is not so. This, 
on the contrary, is the fact, — unpleasant you 
may think it ; pleasant, it seems to me, — that 
you, with all your pretty dresses, and dainty 
looks, and kindly thoughts, and saintly aspir- 
ations, are not one whit more thought of or 



26- INTRODUCTION. 

loved by the great Maker and Master than any 
poor little red, black, or blue savage, running 
wild in the pestilent woods, or naked on the 
hot sands of the earth : and that, of the two, 
you probably know less about God than she 
does ; the only difterence being that she thinks 
little of Him that is right, and you, much 
that is wrong. 

That, then, is the first thing to make sure 
of — that you are not yet perfectly well 
informed on the most abstruse of all possible 
subjects, and that, if you care to behave with 
modesty or propriety, you had better be silent 
about it. 

The second thing which you may make 
sure of is, that however good you may be, 
you have faults ; that however dull you may 
be, you can find out what some of them are ; 
and that however slight they may be, you 
had better make some — not too painful, but 
patient — effort to get quit of them. And so 
far as you have confidence in me at all, trust 
me for this, that how many soever you may 
find or fancy your faults to be, there are only 
two that are of real consequence — Idleness 
and Cruelty. Perhaps you may be proud. 
Well, we can get much good out of pride, if 



INTRODUCTION. 27 

only it be not religious. Perhaps you may 
be vain : it is highly probable ; and very 
pleasant for the people who like to praise 
you. Perhaps you are a little envious : that 
is really very shocking ; but then — so is 
everybody else. Perhaps, also, you are a 
little malicious, which I am truly concerned 
to hear, but should probably only the more, 
if I knew you, enjoy your conversation. But 
whatever else you may be, you must not^be 
useless, and you must not be cruel. If there 
is any one point which, in six thousand years 
of thinking about right and wrong, wise and 
good men have agreed upon, or successively 
by experience discovered, it is that God dis- 
likes idle and cruel people more than any 
other ; — that His first order is, "Work while 
you have light;" and His second, "Be merci- 
ful while you have mercy." 

"Work while you have light," especially 
while you have the light of morning. There 
are few things more wonderful to me than 
that old people never tell young ones how 
precious their youth is. They sometimes 
sentimentally regret their own earlier days ; 
sometimes prudently forget them ; often fool- 
ishly rebuke the young, often more foolishly 



28 INTRODUCTION. 

indulge, often most foolishly thwart and re- 
strain ; but scarcely ever warn or watch them. 
Remember, then, that I, at least, have warned 
you, that the happiness of your life and its 
power, and its part and rank in earth or in 
heaven, depend on the way you pass your 
days now. They are not to be sad days ; 
far from that, the first duty of young people 
is to be delighted and delightful ; but they 
are to be in the deepest sense solemn days. 
There is no solemnity so deep, to a rightly- 
thinking creature, as that of dawn. But not 
only in that beautiful sense, but in all their 
character and method, they are to be solemn 
days. Take your Latin dictionary, and h)ok 
out " sollennis," and fix the sense of the word 
well in your mind, and remember that every 
day of your early life is ordaining irrevocably, 
for good or evil, the custom and practice of 
your soul ; ordaining either sacred customs 
of dear and lovely recurrence, en* trenching 
deeper and deeper the furrows for seed of 
sorrow. Now, therefore, see that no day 
passes in which you do not make yourself a 
somewhat better creature ; and in order to do 
that, find out, first, what you are now. Do 
not think vaguely about it ; take pen and 



INTRODUCTION. 29 

paper, and write down as accurate a descrip- 
tion of yourself as you can, with the date to 
it. If you dare not do so, find out why you 
dare not, and try to get strength of heart 
enough to look yourself fairly in the face, in 
mind as well as body. I do not doubt but 
that the mind is a less pleasant thing to look 
at than the face, and for that very reason it 
needs more looking at ; so always have two 
mirrors on your toilet table, and see that 
with proper care you dress body and mind 
before them daily. After the dressing is once 
over for the day, think no more about it : as 
your hair will blow about your ears, so your 
temper and thoughts will get ruffled with the 
aay's work, and may need, sometimes, twice 
dressing ; but I don't want you to carry about 
a mental pocket-comb ; only to be smooth 
braided always in the morning. 

Write down then, frankly, what you are, 
or, at least, what you think yourself, not 
dwelling upon those inevitable faults which I 
have just told you are of little consequence, 
and which the. action of a right life will shake 
or smooth away ; but that you may determine 
to the best of your intelligence w4iat you are 
good for, and can be made into. You will 



30 INTRODUCTION. 

find that the mere resolve not to be useless, 
and the honest desire to help other people, 
will, in the quickest and delicatest ways, im- 
prove yourself. 

Then, besides this more delicate work, re- 
solve to do every day some that is useful in 
the vulgar sense. Learn first thoroughly the 
economy of the kitchen ; the good and bad 
qualities of every common article of food, 
and the simplest and best modes of their 
preparation : when you have time, go and 
help in the cooking of poorer families, and 
show them how to make as much of every- 
thing as possible, and how to make little, 
nice ; coaxing and tempting them into tidy 
and pretty ways, and pleading for well- 
folded table-cloths, however coarse, and for 
a flower or two out of the garden to strew 
on them. If you manage to get a clean 
table-cloth, bright plates on it, and a good 
dish in the middle, of your own cooking, you 
may ask leave to say a short grace ; and let 
your religious ministries be confined to that 
much for the present. 

Now, the very definition of evil is in ir- 
remediableness. It means sorrow, or sin, 
which end in death ; and assuredly, as far as 



INTRODUCTION. 31 

we know, or can conceive, there are many 
conditions both of pain and sin which cannot 
but so end. Of course we are ignorant and 
blind creatures, and we cannot know what 
seeds of good may be in present suffering, or 
present crime, but with what we cannot know, 
we are not concerned. It is conceivable that 
murderers and liars may in some distant 
world be exalted into a higher humanity than 
they could have reached without homicide or 
falsehood ; but the contingency is not one by 
which our actions should be guided. There 
is, indeed, a better hope that the beggar, 
who lies at our gates in misery, may, within 
gates of pearl be comforted ; but the Master, 
whose words are our only authority for think- 
ing so, never Himself inflicted disease as a 
blessing, nor sent away the hungry unfed, or 
the wounded unhealed. 

Believe me, then, the only right principle 
of action here, is to consider good and evil 
as defined by our natural sense of both ; and 
to strive to promote the one, and to conquer 
the other, with as hearty endeavor as if there 
were, indeed, no other world than this. 
Above all, get quit of the absurd idea that 
Heaven will interfere to correct great errors. 



32 INTRODUCTION. 

while allowing its laws to take their course 
in punishing small ones. If you prepare a 
dish of food carelessly, you do not expect 
Providence to make it palatable ; neither, if, 
through years of folly, you misguide your 
own life, need you expect Divine interfer- 
ence to bring round everything at last for the 
best. I tell you, positively, the w^orld is not 
so constituted ; the consequences of great mis- 
takes are just as sure as those of small ones, 
and the happiness of your whole life, and of 
all the lives over which you have power, de- 
pends as literally on your own common sense 
and discretion as the excellence and order of 
the feast of a day . 



SESAME ANT> LILIES. 



LECTURE I. 

Sesame : 

or kings' treasuries. 

Yoii shall each have a cake of sesame, — and ten pound a 
LuciAN : The F Sherman. 

I want to speak to you about the treasures 
hidden in books ; and about the way we find 
them, and the way we lose them. A grave 

1. Sesame and Lilies. This title is characteristic of 
Ruskin's titles generally, in that they give little or no 
clue to the subject matter of the essays they name. 
This work is properly two essays on books and reading, 
the first addressed to young men and the second to 
young women. Other titles quite as non-committal are 
Crown of Wild Olive., a series of essays addressed to 
working men; Aratra Fentelici, hctures on the elements 
of sculpture ; Ethics of the Dust, conversations on crystal- 
ization. Study still other titles and see if this is a 
just criticism. 

3. Sesame. Small seeds used for foo^l in the far 
East. These seeds are ground into meal from which 
an oily cake is made. Here used as a magical pass- 
word to "kings' treasuries." In the story of The 
Forty Thieves., in Arabian Nights, open sesame was the 
magical command which opened the robbers' den. 

6. Lucian. A Greek writer famous for his rhetoric 
and ridicule, who flourished 150 A. D. 



34 SESAME AND LILIES. 

subject, you will say, and a wide one ! Yes ; 
so wide that I shall make no effort to touch 
the compass of it. I will try only to bring 
before you a few simple thoughts about read- 

sing, which press themselves upon me every 
day more deeply, as I watch the course of the 
public mind with respect to our daily enlarg- 
ing means of education, and the answeringly 
wider spreading on the levels, of the irriga- 

lotion of literature. 

It happens that I have practically some con- 

\r nection with schools for different classes of 

youth ; and I receive many letters from parents 

respecting the education of their children. 

15 In the mass of these letters I am always struck 
by the precedence which the idea of a " posi- 
tion in life " takes above all other thoughts in 
the parents' — more especially in the mothers' 
— minds. " The education befitting such and 

5»osuch a station in life,''' — this is the phrase, 
this is the object, always. They never seek, 
as far as I can make out, an education good 
in itself; *even the conception of abstract 
rightness in training rarely seems reached by 

25 the writers. But an education " which shall 
keep a good coat on my son's back ; which 
shall enable him to ring with confidence the 



SESAME AND LILIES. 35 

visitors' bell at double-belled doors ; which 
shall result ultimately in the establishment of 
a double-belled door to his own house — in a 
word, which shall lead to advancement in 
life — this we pray for on bent knees; and s 
this is all we pray for. " It never seems to 
occur to the parents that there may be an 
education which in itself is advancement in 
Life ; that any other than that may perhaps be 
advancement in Death ; and that this essential ^^ 
education might be more easily got, or given, 
than they fancy, if they set about it in the 
right way, while it is for no price and by no 
ftivor to be got, if they set about it in the 
wrong. 15 

1^ Indeed, among the ideas most prevalent and 
effective in the mind of this busiest of coun- 
tries, I suppose the first — at least that which 
is confessed with the greatest frankness, and 
put forward as the fittest stimulus to youthful 20 
exertion — is this of "Advancement in life. " 
May I ask you to consider with me what this 
idea practically includes, and what it should 
include ? 

L Double-belled doors. Many of the best English 
houses have double bells, one for visitors and one for 
people calling on business. 

20. Stimulus. Something that rouses the mind, an 
incentive. 



36 SESAME AND LILIES. 

Practically, then, at present, " advance- 
ment in life" means, becoming conspicuous 
in life — obtaining a position which shall be 
acknowledged by others to be respectable or 

5 honorable. We do not understand by this 
advancement, in general, the mere making of 
money, but the being known to have made it ; 
not the accomplishment of any great aim, but 
the being seen to have accomplished it. In a 

10 word, we mean the gratification of aurjhirst 
,for applause. That thirst, if the last infirm- 
ity of noble minds, is also the first infirmity 
of weak ones, and on the whole, the strongest 
in pulsive influence of average humanity. 

15 The greatest efforts of the race have always 

been traceable to the love of praise, as its 

greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure. 

L, I am not about to attack or defend this 

impulse. I want you only to feel how it lies 

20 at the root of effort, especially of all modern 
eflfort. It is the gratification of vanity which 
is, with us, the stimulus of toil and balm of 
repose. So closely does it touch the very 
springs of life that the wounding of our van- 

25ity is always spoken of (and truly) as in its 

measure mortal \ we call it "mortification," 

2. Conspicuous Easy to be seeu, attracting the eye. 



orjOi\iviJii Aiyu x^liulcjO. 



37 



using the same expression which we should 
apply to a gangrenous and incurable bodily 
hurt. And although a few of us may be 
physicians enough to recognize the various 
effect of this passion upon health and energy, & 
I believe most honest men know% and would 
at once acknowdedge, its leading power with 
them as a motive. The seaman does not com- 
monly desire to be made captain only because 
he knows he can manage the ship better than lo 
any other sailor on board ; he w^ants to be 
made captain that he may be called captain. 
The clergyman does not usually want to be 
made a bishop only because he believes t- at 
no other hand can, as firmly as his, direct the is 
diocese through its diflSculties ; he wants to be 
made bishop primarily that he may be called 
''My Lord. " And a prince does not usually 
desire to enlarge, or a subject to gain, a king- 
dom because he believes that no one else can 20 
as well serve the State upon its throne, but 
briefly, because he wishes to be addressed as 
'' Your Majesty " by as many lips as may be 
brought to such utterance. 

2. Gangrenous. Affected by grangrene, that is, de- 
cay or mortificatioD. 

16. Diocese. The district in which a bishop exercises 
his ecclesiastical authority. 



38 SESAME AND LILIES. 

^j This, then, being the main idea of "ad- 
vancement in life," the force of it applies for 
all of us, according to our station, particu- 
larly to that secondary result of such advance- 

5 ment which we call " getting into good soci- 
ety." We want to get into good society, 
not that we may have it, but that we may be 
seen in it ; and our notion of its goodness 
depends primarily on its conspicuousness. 

10 Will you pardon me if I pause for a mo- 
ment to put what I fear you may think an 
impertinent question? I never can go on 
with an address unless I feel or know that 
my audience are either with me or against 

15 me. I do not much care which, in begin- 
ning; but I must know where they are. 
And I would fain find out at this instant 
whether you think I am putting the motives 
of popular action too low. I am resolved 

20 to-night to state them low enough to be ad- 
mitted as probable ; for whenever, in my 
writings on Political Economy, I assume 
that a little honesty, or generosity, — or what 
used to be called " virtue," — may be calcu- 

25lated upon as a human motive of action, 
people always answer me, saying, "You must 
not calculate on that ; that is not human na- 



SESAME AND LILIES. 39 

ture. You must not assume anything to be 
common to men but acquisitiveness and jeal- 
ousy ; no other feeling ever has influence on 
them, except accidentally, and in matters out 
of the way of business." I begin, accord- s 
ingly, to-night low in the scale of motives ; 
but I must know if you think me right in 
doing so. Therefore, let me ask those who 
admit the love of praise to be usually the 
strono^est motive in men's minds in seekino^io 
advancement, and the honest desire of doing 
any kind of duty to be an entirely secondary 
one, to hold up their hands. (About a doze7i 
hands held up, — the audience, partly, not be- 
ing sw^e the lecturer is serious, and partly shyib 
of expressing opinion.) I am quite serious, 
— I really do want to know what you think ; 
however, I can judge by putting the reverse 
question. Will those who think that duty 
is generally the first, and love of praise the 20 
second, motive, hold up their hands? (One 
hand reported to have been held up, behind the 
lecturer.) Very good ; I see you are with 
me, and that you think I have not begun too 
near the ground. Now, without teasing you 25 
by putting farther question, I venture to as- 
2. Acquisitiveness. Propensity to acquire property. 



40 SESAME AND LILIES. 

sume that you will admit duty as at least a 
secondary or tertiary motive. You think that 
the desire of doing something useful, or ob- 
taining some real good, is indeed an existent 

5 collateral idea, though a secondary one, in 
most men's desire of advancement. You will 
grant that moderately honest men desire place 
and office, at least in some measure, for the 
sake of beneficent power, and would wish to 

10 associate rather with sensible and well-in- 
formed persons than with fools and ignorant 
persons, whether they are seen in the com- 
pany of the sensible ones or not. And fin- 
nally, without being troubled by repetition of 

15 any common truisms about the preciousness 
of friends and the influence of companions, 
you will admit, doubtless, that according to 
the sincerity of our desire that our friends 
may be true, and our companions wise, and 

20 in proportion to the earnestness and discretion 
with which we choose both, will be the gen- 
eral chances of our happiness and usefulness. 
But o^rantins: that we had both the will and 
the sense to choose our friends well, how few 

25 of us have the power, or at least, how limited 

2. Tertiary. Of the third order. 
15. Truisms. Undoubted or self-evident truths. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 41 

for most is the sphere of choice ! Nearly all 
our associations are determined by chance or 
necessity, and restricted within a narrow 
circle. We cannot know whom we would, 
and those whom we know we cannot have at ^ 
our side when we most need them. All the 
hiofher circles of human intellio^ence are, to 
those beneath, only momentarily and par- 
tially open. We may by good fortune obtain 
a glimpse of a great poet, and hear the sound lo 
of his voice, or put a question to a man of 
science, and be answered good-humoredly. 
We may intrude ten minutes' talk on a cabi- 
net minister, answered probably with words 
worse than silence, being deceptive, or snatch, ^* 
once or twice in our lives, the privilege of 
throwing a bouquet in the path of a princess, 
or arresting the kind glance of a queen. 
And yet these momentary chances we covet, 
and spend our years and passions and powers ^o 
in pursuit of little more than these ; while, 
meantime, there is a society continually open 
to us of people who will talk to us as long as 
we like, whatever our rank or occupation, — 
talk to us in the best words they can choose, ^5 
and of the things nearest their hearts. And 
this society, because it is so numerous and 



42 SESAME AND LILIES. 

SO gentle, and can be kept waiting round us 
all day long (kings and statesmen lingering 
patiently, not to grant audience, but to gain 
it), in those plainly furnished and narrow 

5 anterooms, our bookcase shelves, — we make 

no account of that company, perhaps never 

listen to a word they would say, all day long. 

You may tell me perhaps, or think within 

yourselves, that the apathy with which we re- 

logard this company of the noble, who are 
praying us to listen to them, and the passion 
with which we pursue the company probably 
of the ignoble, who despise us, or who have 
nothing to teach us, are grounded in this, — 

15 that we can see the faces of the living men; 
and it is themselves, and not their sayings, 
with which we desire to become familiar. 
But it is not so. Suppose you never were to 
see their faces ; suppose you could be put 

20 behind a screen in the statesman's cabinet 
or the prince's chamber, would you not be 
glad to listen to their words, though you 
were forbidden to advance beyond the screen ? 
And when the screen is only a little less, 

6. Anterooms. A room before. Here, a waiting- 
room. 

9. Apathy. Want of feeling or emotion. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 43 

folded in two instead of four, and you can 
be hidden behind the cover of the two boards 
that bind a book, and listen all day long, not 
to the casual talk, but to the studied, deter- 
mined, chosen addresses of the wisest of men, ^ 
— this station of audience and honorable privy 
council you despise ! 

But perhaps you will say that it is because 
the living people talk of things that are pass- 
ing, and are of immediate interest to you,io 
that you desire to hear them. Nay, that can- 
not be so ; for the living people will them- 
selves tell you about passing matters much 
better in their writings than in their careless 
talk. But I admit that this motive does is 
influence you, so far as you prefer those 
rapid and ephemeral writings to slow^ and en- 
during writings, — books, properly so-called. 
For all books are divisible into two classes, 
— the books of the hour, and the books of 20 
all time. Mark this distinction ; it is not one 
of quality only. It is not merely the bad 
book that does not last, and the good one 
that does ; it is a distinction of species. 

6. Privy council. The principal council of the 
sovereign. 

17. Ephemeral. Literally, beginning and ending in 
a day. 



44 SESAME AND LILIES. 

There are good books for the hour, and good 
ones for all time ; bad books for the hour, 
and bad ones for all time. I must define the 
two kinds before I go farther. 

6 The good book of the hour, then, — I do 
not speak of the bad ones, — is simply the 
useful or pleasant talk of some person whom 
you cannot otherwise converse with, printed 
for you. Very useful often, telling you what 

10 you need to know ; very pleasant often, as a 
sensible friend's present talk would be. These 
bright accounts of travels ; good-humored 
and witty discussions of question ; lively or 
pathetic story-telling in the form of novel ; 

wfirm fact-telling, by the real agents concerned 
in the events of passing history — all these 
books of the hour, multiplying among us as 
education becomes more general, are a pecu- 
liar possession of the present age. We 

20 ought to be entirely thankful for them, and 
entirely ashamed of ourselves if we make no 
o^ood use of them. But we make the worst 
possible use if we allow them to usurp the 
place of true books ; for strictly speaking, 

25 they are not books at all, but merely letters 
or newspapers in good print. Our friend's 
letter may be delightful or necessary to-day, 



SESAME- AND LILIES. 45 



— whether worth keeping or not, is to be 
considered. The newspaper may be entirely- 
proper at breakfast time, but assuredly it is 
not reading for all day ; so, though bound 
up in a volume, the long letter which gives & 
you so pleasant an account of the inns and 
roads and weather last year at such a place, 
or which tells you that amusing story, or 
gives you the real circumstances of such and 
such events, however valuable for occasionaP^ 
reference, may not be in the real sense of the 
word a "book" at all, nor in the real sense 
to be " read." A book is essentiall}^ not a 
talked thing, but a written thing, and written 
not with a view of mere communication, but^* 
of permanence. The book of talk is printed 
only because its author cannot speak to 
thousands of people at once ; if he could he 
would, — the volume is mere 7nidtiplication 
of his voice. You cannot talk to your friend 20 
in India ; if you could, you would. You 
write instead ; that is mere conveyance of 
voice. But a book is written, not to multiply 
the voice merely, not to carry it merely, but 
to perpetuate it. The author has something 25 
to say which he perceives to be true and use- 
ful, or helpfully l)eautiful. So far as he 



46 SESAME AND LILIES. 

knows, no one has yet said it; so far as he 
knows, no one else can say it. He is bound 
to say it clearly and melodiously, if he may ; 
clearly, at all events. In the sum of his life 

6 he finds this to be the thing or group of 
things manifest to him, — this the piece of 
true knowledo^e or sio:ht which his share of 
sunshine and earth has permitted him to 
seize. He would fain set it down forever, 

10 engrave it on rock, if he could, saying, 

y This is the best of me ; for the rest, I ate 
and drank and slept, loved and hated like 
another. My life w^as as the vapor, and is 
not ; but this I saw and knew, — this, if any- 

16 thing of mine, is worth your memory." 
That is his " writing ;" it is in his small 
liuman way, and with whatever degree of 
true inspiration is in him, his inscription oi 
scripture. That is a "book." ^ 

20 Perhaps you think no books were ever so 
written ? 

But, again, I ask you, do you at all believe 
in honesty or at all in kindness, or do you 
think there is never any honesty or benevo- 

26lence in wise people? None of us, I hope, 
are so unhappy as to think that. Well, what- 
ever bit of a wise man's work is honestly and 



SESAME AND LILIES. 47 

benevolently done, that bit is his book, or his 
piece of art.* It is mixed always with evil 
fragments, — ill-done, redundant, affected 
work. But if you read rightly, you will 
easily discover the true bits, and those are ^ 
the book. 

Now, books of this kind have been written 
in all ages by their greatest men, — by great 
readers, great statesmen, and great thinkers. 
These are all at your choice ; and Life is lo 
short. You have heard as much before ; yet 
have you measured and mapped out this short 
life and its possibilities? Do you know, if 
you read this, that you cannot read that ; that 
what you lose to-day you cannot gain to-mor- is 
row? Will you go and gossip with your 
housemaid or your stable-boy, when you may 
talk with queens and kings ; or flatter your- 
selves that it is with any worthy conscious- 
ness of your own claims to respect that you 20 
jostle with the hungry and common crowd 
for entree here, and audience there, when all 
the while this eternal court is open to you, 
with its society, wide as the world, multitu- 

* Note this sentence carefully, and compare the 
" Queen of the Air," § 106. 

22. Entree, (an'tra.) Permission or right to enter. 



48 SESAME AND LILIES. 

dinous as its days, — the chosen and the 
mighty of every place and time? Into that 
3^ou may enter always ; in that you may take 
fellowship and rank according to your wish ; 

* from that, once entered into it, you can never 
be an outcast but by your own fault ; by your 
aristocracy of companionship there, your own 
inherent aristocracy will be assuredly tested, 
and the motives with w^hich you strive to take 

10 high place in the society of the living, meas- 
ured, as to all the truth and sincerity that are 
in them, by the place you desire to take in 
this company of the dead. 

"The place you desire," and the place you 

ihfit yourself for^ I must also say, because, 

observe, this court of the past differs from all 

living aristocracy in this, — it is open to labor 

and to merit, but to nothing else. No wealth 

will bribe, no name overawe, no artifice 

deceive, the guardian of those Elysian gates. 

In the deep sense, no vile or vulgar person 

ever enters there. At the portiers of that 

silent Faubourg St. Germain, there is but 

20. Elysian. Relating to Elysium, the name given 
by the Greeks to the abode of the blessed after death . 

22. Portiers. Doors or gates to fine houses. 

23. Faubourg St. Germain (to' bor san zher-man'.) 
A part of Paris in which the nobility formerly resided. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 49 

brief question : " Do you deserve to enter? 
Puss. Do you ask to be the companion of 
nobles? Make yourself noble, and you shall 
be. Do you long for the conversation of the 
wise? Learn to understand it, and you shall f> 
hear it. But on other terms? — No. If you_ 
will not rise to us, we cannot stoop to you. 
The living lord may assume courtesy, the 
living philosopher explain his thought to you 
with considerate pain; but here we neither lo 
feign nor interpret. You must rise to the 
level of our thoughts if you would be glad- 
dened by them, and share our feelings if you 
would recognize our presence. " 
% This, then, is what you have to do, and lis 
admit that it is much. You must, in a word, 
love these people, if you are to be among 
them. No ambition is of any use. They scorn 
your ambition. You must love them, and 
show your love in these two following ways :2o 

(a) First, by a true desire to be taught by 
them, and to enter into their thoughts. To 
enter into theirs, observe, not to find your 
own expressed by them. If the person who 
wrote the book is not wiser than you, you 25 
need not read it ; if he be, he will think differ- 
ently from you in many respects. 



50 SESAME AND LILIES. 

Very ready we are to say of a book, "How 
good this is, — that's exactly what I think !" 
But the right feeling is, "How strange that 
is ! I never thought of that before, and yet 

5 1 see it is true ; or if I do not now, I hope I 
shall some day. " But whether thus submis- 
sively or not, at least be sure that you go 
to the author to get at his meaning, not to 
find yours. Judge it afterwards if you think 

10 yourself qualified to do so; but ascertain it 
first. And be sure also, if the author is 
worth anything, that you will not get at his 
meaning all at once, — nay, that at his whole 
meaning you will not for a long time arrive in 

16 any wise. Not that he does not say what he 
means, and in strong words too ; but he can- 
not say it all, and what is more strange, ivill 
not, but in a hidden way and in parables, in 
order that he may be sure you want it. I can- 

20 not quite see the reason of this, nor analyze 
that cruel reticence in the breasts of wise 
men which makes them always hide their 
deeper thought. They do not give it to you 
by way of help, but of reward, and will 

25 make themselves sure that you deserve it 

18. Parable. A short story by means of which a 
moral is drawn. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 51 

before they allow you to reach it. But it is 
the same with the physical type of wisdom, 
gold. There seems, to you and me, no reason 
why the electric forces of the earth should 
not carry whatever there is of gold within it 5 
at once to the mountain-tops ; so that kings 
and people might know that all the gold they 
could get was there, and without any trouble 
of digging, or anxiety, or chance, or waste 
of time, cut it away, and coin as much asio 
they needed. But Nature does not manage 
it so. She puts it in little fissures in the 
earth, nobody knows where. You may dig 
long and find none ; you must dig painfully 
to find any. i& 

" And it is just the same with men's best 
wisdom. When you come to a good hook> 
you must ask yourself, " Am I inclined to 
work as an Australian miner would? Are 
my pickaxes and shovels in good order, and 20 
am I in good trim myself, my sleeves well up 
to the elbow, and my breath good, and my tem- 
per ? " And keeping the figure a little longer, 
even at cost of tiresomeness, for it is a thor- 
oughly useful one, the metal you are in 25 
search of being the author's mind or meaning, 
23. Figure. Figure of speech. What figure is this? 



52 SESAME AND LILIES. ^ 

his words are as the rock which you have to 
crush and smelt in order to get at it. And 
your pickaxes are your own care, wit and 
learning ; your smelting furnace is your own 
5 thoughtful soul. Do not hope to get at any 
good author's meaning without those tools 
and that fire ; often you will need sharp- 
est, finest chiselling and patientest fussing 
before you can gather one grain of the 

10 metal. 

*3 And, therefore, first of all, I tell you earn- 
estly and authoritatively (I know I am right 
in this) you must get into the habit of looking 
intensely at words, and assurin g you rself of 

15 their meaning, syllable Tyy syllable — nay, 
letter by letter. For though it is only by 
reason ol^ the opposition of letters in the 
function of signs to sounds in the function of 
signs, that the study of books is called " liter- 

20ature," and that a man versed in it is called 
by the consent of nations, a man of letters 
instead of a man of books or of words, 
you may yet connect with that accidental 
nomenclature this real fact, — that you 

25mi2:ht read all the books in the British 

24. Nomenclature. The technical names used in any 
branch of science or art. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 53 

Museum (if you could live long enough) and 
remain an utterly " illiterate," uneducated 
person ; but that if you read ten pages of a 
good book, letter by letter, — that is to say, 
with real accuracy, — you are forevermore in 6 
some measure an educated person. The 
entire difference between education and non- 
education (as regards the merely intellectual 
part of it) consists in this accuracy. A well- 
educated gentleman may not know manyio 
languages, may not be able to speak any but 
his own, may have read very few books. 
But whatever language he knows, he knows 
precisely ; whatever word he pronounces, he 
pronounces rightly. Above all, he is learned i6 
in the peerage of words, knows the words of 
true descent and ancient blood, at a glance, 
from words of modern canaille, remembers 
all their ancestry, their intermarriages, dis- 
tant relationships, and the extent to which 20 
they were admitted, and oflSces they held, 
among the national noblesse of words at any 

1. British Museum. England's great national mu- 
seum for all sorts of antiquities and manuscripts. Sit- 
uated in London. 

16. Peerage. Rank or dignity. Here of words, not 
of peers. 

18. Canaille. The rabble. 

22. Noblesse. Nobility. 



54 SESAME AND LILIES. 

time and in any country. But an unedu- 
cated person may know, by memory, many 
languages, and talk them all, and yet truly 
know not a word of any, — not a word even 

6 of his own. An ordinarily clever and sensible 
seaman will be able to make his way ashore 
at most ports, yet he has only to speak a 
sentence of any language to be known for an 
illiterate person ; so also the accent, or turn 

10 of expression of a single sentence, will at 
once mark a scholar. And this is so strongly 
felt, so conclusively admitted, by educated 
persons, that a false accent or a mistaken 
syllable is enough, in the parliament of any 

16 civilized nation, to assign to a man a certain 
degree of inferior standing forever. 

I L And this is right ; but it is a pity that the 
accuracy insisted on is not greater, and 
required to a serious purpose. It is right that 

20 a false Latin quantity should excite a smile in 
the House of Commons ; but it is wrong that 
a false English meaning should not excite a 
frown there. Let the accent of words be 
watched, and closely; let their meaning be 

2'^ watched more closely still, and fewer will do 

20. Quantity. The measure of a syllable ; that which 
determines the time in which it is pronounced. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 55 

the work. A few words, well chosen and 
distinguished, will do work that a thousand 
cannot, when every one is acting, equivocally, 
in the function of another. Yes : and words, 
if they are not watched, will do deadly work 5 
sometimes. There are masked words droning 
and skulking about us in Europe just now 
(there never were so many, owing to the 
spread of shallow, blotching, blundering, 
infectious "information," or rather deform- lo 
ation, everywhere, and to the teaching of 
catechisms and phrases at schools instead of 
human meanings) — there are masked words ^ 
abroad, I say, which nobody understands, but 
which everybody uses, and most people willw 
also fight for, live for, or even die for, fancy- 
ing they mean this or that or the other of 
things dear to them ; for such words wear 
chameleon cloaks, — '' groundlion " cloaks, of 
the color of the ground of any man's fancy ; 20 
on that ground they lie in wait, and rend him 
with a spring from it. There never were 
creatures of prey so mischievous, never diplo- 
matists so cunning, never poisoners so deadly, 

19. Chameleon. A kind of lizard which has the 
power of changing its color to correspond with its 
surroundings. 



56 SESAME AND LILIES. 

as these masked words ; they are the unjust 
stewards of all men's ideas. Whatever fancy 
or favorite instinct a man most cherishes, he 
gives to his favorite masked word to take care 

5 of for him. The word at last comes to have 
an infinite power over him, — you cannot get 
at him but by its ministry. 

( \' And in languages so mongrel in breed as 
the English, there is a fjital power of equivo- 

10 cation put into men's hands, almost whether 
they Avill or no, in being able to use Greek or 
Latin words for an idea when they want it to 
be awful, and Saxon or otherwise common 
words when they want it to be vulgar. What 

16a singular and salutary efiect, for instance, 
would be produced on the minds of people 
who are in the habit of taking the form of the 
" Word " they live by for the power of which 
that Word tells them, if we always either 

20 retained, or refused, the Greek form " biblos," 
or "biblion, " as the right expression for 
"book," instead of employing.it only in the 
one instance in which we wish to give dignity 
to the idea, and translating it into English 

1. Unjnst stewards. A reference to Christ's parable 
of the unjust steward in the 16th chapter of Luke. 

8. Mongrel. Of mixed kinds. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 57 

•everywhere else. How wholesome it would 
be for many simple persons if in such places 
(for instance) as Acts xix., 19, we retained 
the Greek expression instead of translating it, 
and they had to read : " Many of them also 5 
which used curious arts brought their Bibles 
together, and burned them before all men ; 
and they counted the price of them, and found 
it fifty thousand pieces of silver" ! Or if, on 
the other hand, we translated where we retain 10 
it, and always spoke of "the Holy Book," 
instead of "Holy Bible," it might come into 
more heads than it does at present that the 
Word of God, by which the heavens were of 
old, and by which they are now kept in store, 15 
cannot be made a present of to anybody in 
morocco binding, nor sown on any wayside 
by help either of steam plough or steam press, 
but is nevertheless being offered to us daily, 
and by us with contumely refused, and sown 20 
in us daily, and by us, as instantly as may be, 
choked. 

("''Now, in order to deal with words rightly, 
this is the habit you must form. Nearly 
every word in your language has been first a 25 

20. Contumely. Haughtiness and contempt com- 
bined. Disdain. 



58 SESAME AND LILIES. 

word of some other language, — of Saxon, 
German, French, Latin, or Greek (not to 
speak of Eastern and primitive dialects). 
And many words have been all these ; that 

5 is to say, have been Greek first, Latin next, 
French or German next, and English last, — 
undergoing a certain change of sense and 
use on the lips of each nation, but retaining 
a deep vital meaning, which all good schol- 

loars feel in employing them, even at this 
day. If you do not know the Greek alpha- 
bet, learn it. Young or old, girl or boy, 
whoever you may be, if you think of reading 
seriously (which, of course, implies that you 

15 have some leisure at command), learn your 
Greek alphabet ; then get good dictionaries 
of all these languages, and whenever you are 
in doubt about a word, hunt it down patiently. 
Read Max Miiller's lectures thoroughly, to 

20 begin with ; and after that, never let a word 
escape you that looks suspicious. It is severe 
work ; but you will find it, even at first, 
interesting, and at last, endlessly amusing. 
And the general gain to your character in 

3. Dialects. Forms of speech. 

19. Mullfr. A noted German student of languages. 
At one time professor of modern languages in Oxford. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 59 

power and precision will be quite incalcu- 
lable. 

Mind, this does not imply knowing, or 
trying to know, Greek or Latin or French. 
It takes a whole life to learn any language 5 
perfectly. But you can easily ascertain the 
meanings through which the English word 
has passed, and those which in a good writ- 
er's work, it must still bear. 
/ And now, merely for example's sake, 1 10 
will, with your permission, read a few lines 
of a true book with you carefully, and see 
what will come out of them. I will take a 
book perfectly known to you all. No Eng- 
lish words are more familiar tons, yet few 15 
perhaps have been read with less sincerity. 
I will take these few following lines of 
^^Lycidas": — 

" Last came . ^d last did go, 
The pilot of the Galilean lake. 20 

Two massy keys he bore of metals twain, 

18. Lycidas. Milton's elegy on the death of his 
friend King. It seems unfortunate that Kuskin selects 
for his minute analysis the only'assailable passage in 
this wonderful classic. Critics in analyzing Lycidas 
always question Milton's taste in introducing this con- 
troversial passage. There is, however, no doubt but 
Milton here uses English for all the powder that is in it 
and this is probably the reason Ruskin has selected the 
passage. 



60 SESAME AND LILIES. 

(The golden opes, the Iron shuts amain). 

He shook his mitred locks, and stern bespake : 

' How well could I have spared for thee, young swain. 

Enow of such as for their bellies' sake 
!> Creep and intrude and climb into the fold ! 

Of other care they little reckoning make 

Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast, 

And shove away the worthy bidden guest; 

Blind mouths ! that scarce themselves know how to hold 
10 A sheep-hook, or have learned aught else, the least 

That to the faithful herdsman's art belongs ! 

What recks it them? What need they? They are sped; 

And when they list, their lean and flashy songs 

Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw 
15 The hungry sheep look up. and are not fed. 

But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw, 

Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread, 

Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw 

Daily devours apace, and nothing said.'" 

20 Let US think over this passage, and examine 
its words. 

First, is it not singular to find Milton as- 
signing to Saint Peter not only his full epis- 
copal function, but the very types of it which 

4. Enow. Enough. 

8. Bidden. Invited.- 

10. Sheep-hook. A shepherd's crook. 

12. Eeck$. What does it matter to them? To reck 
is to care. 

14. Scrannel. Poor, miserable. 

23. Episcopal function. Duty as a bishop. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 61 

Protestants usually refuse most passionately? 
His " mitred " locks ! Milton was no bishop- 
lover ; how comes Saint Peter to be "mitred" ? 
"Two massy keys he bore." Is this, then, 
the power of the keys claimed by the bishops 5 
of Rome, and is it acknowledged here by 
Milton only in a poetical license, for the 
sake of its picturesqueness, that he may get 
the gleam of the golden keys to help his 
effect ? 10 

Do not think it. Great men do not play 
stage tricks with the doctrines of life and 
death ; only little men do that. Milton means 
what he says, and means it with his might 
too, — is going to put the whole strength of 15 
his spirit presently into the saying of it. 
For though not a lover of false bishops, he 
ivas a lover of true ones ; and the Lake-pilot 
is here, in his thoughts, the type and head 
of true episcopal power. For Milton reads 20 
that text, "I will give unto thee the keys of 
the kingdom of heaven" quite honestly. 
Puritan though he be, he would not blot it 
out of the book because there have been bad 
bishops, — nay, in order to understand him, 25 
we must understand that verse first ; it will 
not do to eye it askance, or whisper it under 



62 SESAME AND LILIES. 

our breath, as if it were a weapon of an ad- 
verse sect. It is a solemn, univeral assertion, 
deeply to be kept in mind by all sects. But 
perhaps we shall be better able to reason on 

5 it if we go on a little fjirther, and come back 
to it ; for clearly this marked insistence on 
the power of the true episcopate is to make 
us feel more weightily what is to be charged 
against the false claimants of episcopate, or 

10 generally, against false claimants of power 
and rank in the body of the clergy, they 
who " for their bellies' sake creep and intrude 
and climb into the fold." 

!) 1 • Never think Milton uses those three words 

15 to fill up his verse, as a loose writer would. 
He needs all the three, — specially those 
three, and no more than those, — "creep" 
and " intrude " and " climb " ; no other words 
would or could serve the turn, and no more 

20 could be added. For they exhaustively com- 
prehend the three classes, correspondent to 
the three characters, of men who dishonestly 
seek ecclesiastical power. First, those who 
"creep" into the fold, who do not care for 

25 office, nor name, but for secret influence, and 
do all things occultly and cunningly, consent- 

7. Episcopate. Office and dignity of a bishop. 
26. Occultly. Secretly. 



^ 



SESAME AND LILIES. 63 

ing to any servility of office or conduct, so 
only that they may intimately discern, and 
unawares direct, the minds of men. Then 
those who " intrude" (thrust, that is) them- 
selves into the fold, who by natural insolence & 
of heart and stout eloquence of tongue and 
fearlessly perseverant self-assertion obtain 
hearing and authority with the common crowd. 
Lastly, those who "climb," who, by labor 
and learning both stout and sound, but sel-i® 
iishly exerted in the cause of their own am- 
bition, gain high dignities and authorities, 
and become "lords over the heritage," though 
not "ensamples to the flock." 

Now go on : i* 

'^ Of other care they little reckoning make 
Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast. 
Bli7id Months " — 

I pause again, for this is a strange expres- 
sion, — a broken metaphor, one might think, 20 
careless and unscholarly. 

Not so ; its very audacity and pithiness are 
intended to make us look close at the phrase 
and remember it. Those two monosyllables 

20. Metaphor. A figure of speech in which one thing 
is called by the name of another because of a resem- 
blance. That man is a fox, is a metaphor. 



64 SESAME AND LILIES. 

express the precisely accurate contraries of 
right character in the two great offices of the 
Church, — those of bishop and pastor. 

A " bishop " means " a ])erson who sees. " 

6 A " pastor " means " a person who feeds. " 
The most unbishoply character a man can 
have is therefore to be blind. 

The most unpastoral is, instead of feeding, 
to want to be fed, — to be a mouth. 

Take the two reverses together, and you 
have " blind mouths. " We may advisably 
follow out this idea a little. Nearly all the 
evils in the Church have arisen from bishops 
desiring ^02^'er more than light. They want 

16 authority, not outlook; whereas their real 
office is not to rule, though it may be vigor- 
ously to exhort and rebuke. It is the king's 
office to rule ; the bishop's office is to oversee 
the flock, to number it, sheep by sheep, to be 

20 ready always to give full account of it. Now, 
it is clear he cannot give account of the souls, 
if he has not so much as numbered the bodies 
of his flock. The first thing, therefore, that 
a bishop has to do is at least to put himself 

25 in a position in which, at any moment, he can 
obtain the history from childhood of every 
living soul in his diocese, and of its present 



SESAME AND LILIES. 65 

state. - Down in the back street, Bill and 
Nancy knocking each others' teeth out, — does 
the bishop know all about it? Has he his 
eye upon them? Has he had his eye upon 
them? Can he circumstantially explain to us 5 
how Bill got into the habit of beating Nancy 
about the head ? If he cannot, he is no bishop, 
though he had a mitre as high as Salisbury 
steeple. He is no bishop, — he has sought to 
be at the helm instead of the mast-head, heio 
has no sight of things. " Nay," you say, " it 
is not his duty to look after Bill in the back 
street." What ! the fat sheep that have full 
fleeces, — you think it is only those he should 
look after, while (go back to your Milton) i5 
"the hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, 
besides what the grim wolf, with privy paw " 
(bishops knowing nothing about it) "daily 
devours apace, and nothing said "? 

"But that's not our idea of a bishop. " *2c 
Perhaps not ; but it was Saint Paul's, and it 
was Milton's. They may be right, or we may 
be ; but we must not think we are readins: 

♦Compare the 13th Letter in Time and Tide. 

8. Salisbury steeple. The spire of Salisbury 
Cathedral, the loftiest steeple in England. 



66 SESAME AND LILIES. 

either one or the other by putting our meaning 
into their words. 
q^% 1 go on. 

"But swoln with wind, and tlie rank mist ttiey 
6 draw." 

This is to meet the vulgar answer that " if 
the poor are not looked after in their bodies, 
they are in their souls ; they have spiritual 
food. " 

10 And Milton says, " They have no such thing 
as spiritual food ; they are only swollen with 
wind. " At first you may think that is a 
coarse type, and an obscure one. But again, 
it is a quite literally accurate one. Take up 

16 your Latin and Greek dictionaries and find 
out the meaning of " Spirit." It is only a 
contraction of the Latin word ^'breath," and 
an indistinct translation of the Greek word for 
"wind." The same word is used in writing, 

20 "The wind bloweth where it listeth," and in 
writing, " So 13 everyone that is born of the 
Spirit" ; born of the breathy that is, for it 
means the breath of God in soul and body. 
We have the true sense of it in our words 

25 "inspiration " and "expire." Now, there are 

6. Vulgar. Common, ordinary, as opposed to 
cultivated or educated. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 67 

two kinds of breath with which the flock may 
be filled, — God's breath and man's. The 
breath of God is health and life and peace to . 
them, as the air of heaven is to the flocks on 
the hills ; but man's breath — the word which 5 
Recalls spiritual — is disease and contagion 
to them, as the fog of the fen. They rot 
inwardly with it ; they are puflfed up by it, as 
a dead body by the vapors of its own decom- 
position. This is literally true of all false 10 
religious teaching ; the first and last and 
fatalest sign of it is that " puffing up." Your 
converted children, who teach their parents ; 
your converted convicts, who teach honest 
men; your converted dunces, who, having 15 
lived in cretinous stupefaction half their lives, 
suddenly awaking to the fact of there being 
a God, fancy themselves therefore His pecu- 
liar people and messengers : your sectarians 
of every species, small and great. Catholic 20 
or Protestant, of High Church or Low, in so 

7. Fog of the fen. Note the alliteration here. To 
what extent does Ruskin use this form of embellish- 
ment throughout these essays? 

16. Cretinous. Having the characteristics of a cretin, 
that is, a person deformed in mind and body, such as is 
sometimes found in the valleys of Switzerland. 

21. High Church or Low. Referring to the two great 
divisions of the Church of England. The High Church 
attaches more importance to ceremonies and symbols in 
worship. 



68 SESAME AND LILIES. 

far as they think themselves exclusively in 
the right and others wrong ; and pre-emi- 
nently, in every sect, those who hold that 
men can be saved by thinking rightly instead 

5 of doing rightly, by word instead of act, and 
wish instead of work, — these are the true fog 
children; clouds, these, without water; bod- 
ies, these, of putrescent vapor and skin, 
without blood or flesh, blown bagpipes for 

10 the iiends to pipe with, corrupt and corrupt- 
ing, ''swoln with wind, and the rank mist 
they draw." 
^2 Lastly, let us return to the lines respect- 
ing the power of the keys, for now we can 

15 understand them. Note the difterence be- 
tween Milton and Dante, in their interpreta- 
tion of this power ; for once the latter is 
weaker in thought. He supposes both the 
keys to be of the gate of heaven ; one is of 

20 gold, the other of silver. They are given by 
Saint Peter to the sentinel angel ; and it is 
not easy to determine the meaning either of 
the substances of the three steps of the gate, 

8. Putrescent. Becoming putrid or rotten. 

9. Bag-pipes. The musical instrument now used 
chiefly in the highlands of Scotland. 

U. The keys. J^atthew xvi., 19. 



SESAME AND LILIES. (39 

or of the two keys. But Milton makes one, 
of gold, the key of heaven, the other, of iron, 
the key of the prison in which the wicked 
teachers are to be bound who " have taken 
away the key of knowledge, yet entered not s 
in themselves." 

We have seen that the duties of bishop and 
pastor are to see and feed, and of all who do 
so it is said, "He that watereth, shall be 
watered also himself." But the reverse isio 
truth also. He that watereth not, shall be 
withered himself; and he that seeth not, shall 
himself be shut out of sight, — shut into the 
perpetual prison-house. And that prison 
opens here as well as hereafter ; he who is to i& 
be bound in heaven mu^st first be bound on 
earth. That command to the strong angels, 
of which the rock-apostle is the image, "Take 
him, and bind him hand and foot, and cast 
him out," issues, in its measure, against the 20 
teacher, for every help withheld, and for 
every truth refused, and for every falsehood 
enforced ; so that he is more strictly fettered 
the more he fetters, and farther outcast 
as he more and more misleads, till at last 25 
the bars of the iron cage close upon him, 

18. Rock-apostle. Pet^^r : Matthew xvi., 18. 



70 SESAME AND LILIES. 

and as "the golden opes, the iron shuts 
amain." 

We have got something out of the lines, I 
think, and much more is yet to be found in 

5 them; but we have done enough by way of 
example of the kind of word-by-word exam- 
ination of your author which is rightly called 
"reading," — watching every accent and ex- 
pression, and putting ourselves always in the 

10 author's place, annihilating our own person- 
ality, and seeking to enter into his, so as to 
be able assuredly to say, " Thus Milton 
thought," not " Thus / thought, in mis-read- 
ing Milton." And by this process you will 

15 gradually come to attach less weight to your 
own "Thus I thought" at other times. You 
will begin to perceive that what you thought 
was a matter of no serious importance ; that 
your thoughts on any subjects are not per- 

20 haps the clearest and wisest that could be ar- 
rived at thereupon ; in fact, that unless you 
are a very singular person, you cannot be 
said to have any "thoughts " at all ; that you 
have no materials for them in any serious 

25 matters,* — no right to "think," but only to 

♦Modern "education" for the most part signifies giv- 
ing people the faculty of thinking wrong on every con- 
ceivable subject of importance to them. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 71 

try to learn more of the facts. Nay, most 
probably all your life (unless, as I said, you 
are a singular person) you will have no le- 
gitimate right to an " opinion " on any busi- 
ness, except that instantly under your hand. « 
What must of necessity be done you can al- 
ways find out, beyond question, how to do. 
Have you a house to keep in order, a com- 
modity to sell, a field to plough, a ditch to 
cleanse? There need be no two opinions lo 
about the proceedings ; it is at your peril if 
you have not much more than an " an opin- 
ion " on the way to manage such matters. 
And also, outside of your own business, there 
are one or two subjects on which you arei& 
bound to have but one opinion, — that rog- 
uery and lying are objectionable, and are in- 
stantly to be flogged out of the way when- 
ever discovered ; that covetousness and love 
of quarrelling are dangerous dispositions even 20 
in children, and deadly dispositions in men 
and nations ; that in the end, the God of 
heaven and earth loves active, modest, and 
kind people, and hates idle, proud, greedy, 
and cruel ones. On these general facts you 25 
are bound to have but one, and that a very 
strong, opinion. For the rest, respecting 



72 SESAME AND LILIES. 

religions, governments, sciences, arts, you 
will find that on the whole you can know 
NOTHING, judge nothing ; that the best you 
can do, even though you may be a well-edu- 
scated person, is to be silent, and strive to 
be wiser every day, and to understand a 
little more of the thoughts of others, which 
so soon as you try to do honestly, you will 
discover that the thoughts even of the wisest 

10 are very little more than pertinent questions. 
To put the diflSculty into a clear shape, and 
exhibit to you the grounds for i7idecision, that 
is all they can generally do for you ; and well 
for them and for us if indeed they are able 

15 "to mix the music with our thoughts, and 
sadden us with heavenly doubts." This writer 
from whom I have been reading to you is not 
among the first or wisest. He sees shrewdly 
as far as he sees, and therefore it is easy to 

20 find out his full meaning ; but with the greater 
men you cannot fathom their meaning; they 
do not even wholly measure it themselves, it 
is so wide. Suppose I had asked you, for 
instance, to seek for Shakespeare's opinion 

25 instead of Milton's on this matter of church 
authority, — or of Dante's. Have any of you at 
10. Pertinent. Pertaining to the point. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 73 

this instant the least idea what either thought 
about it ? Have you ever balanced the scene 
with the bishops in Richard III. against the 
character of Cranmer ; the description of Saint 
Francis and Saint Dominic against that of him s 
who made Virgil wonder to gaze upon him, — 
"disteso, tanto vilmento, nelF eterno esilio" ; 
or of him whom Dante stood beside, "come '1 
frate che confessa lo perfido assassin " ? * 
Shakespeare and Alighieri knew men better lo 
than most of us, I presume. They were both 
in the midst of the main struggle between the 
temporal and spiritual powers. They had an 
opinion, we may guess. But where is it? 
Bring it into court! Put Shakespeare's oris 
Dante's creed into articles, and send it up for 
trial by the ecclesiastical courts I 
^ t~ You will not be able, I tell you again, for 
many and many a day to come at the real 

* Inf. xxiii., 125, 126; xix., 49, 50. 

4. St. Francis. St. Francis of Assisi, founder of 
the Franciscan order of monks. 

5. St. Dominic. Founder of the Dominicans. 

5. Him. Caiaphas, "distended (on the cross) so 
ignominiously in the eternal exile." Dante's Inferno, 
xxii., 126. 

6. Him. Nicholas III. Inferno, 19, 49. 

10. Alighieri. ( a-le-ge-a're.) The last part of Dante's 
name. 



74 SESAME AND LILIES. 

purposes and teaching of these great men ; 
but a very little honest study of them will 
enable you to perceive that what you took for 
your own "judgment" was mere chance 

6 prejudice, and drifted; helpless, entangled 
weed of castaway thought, — nay, you will 
see that most men's minds are indeed little 
better than rous^h heath wilderness, nesflected 
and stubborn, partly barren, partly over- 

10 grown with pestilent brakes and venomous, 
wind-sown herbage of evil surmise ; that the 
first thing you have to do for them and your- 
self is eagerly and scornfully to set fire to thisy 
burn all the jungle into wholesome ash-heaps, 

15 and then plough and sow. All the true lit- 
erary work before you, for life, must begin 
with obedience to that order, " Break up your 
fallow ground, and soiv not among thorns.'' 
(h) Having then faithfully listened to the 

20 great teachers, that you may enter into their 
thoughts, you have yet this higher advance to 
make, — you have to enter into their hearts. 
As you go to them first for clear sight, so you 
must stay with them that you may share at I ist 

25 their just and mighty passion. Passion, or 

17. " Break up your fallow ground" etc. Jeren.iab 
iv., 3. 



SESAME AND LILIES 75 

" sensation." I am not afraid of the word, still 
less of the thing. You have heard many out- 
cries against sensation lately, but, I can tell 
you, it is not less sensation we want, but 
more. The ennobling difference between one s 
man and another — between one animal and 
another — is precisely in this, that one feels 
more than another. If we were sponges, 
perhaps sensation might not be easily got for 
us; if we were earth-worms, liable at every lo 
instant to be cut in two by the spade, perhaps 
too much sensation mio^ht not be tjood for us. 
But being human creatures, it is good for us ; 
nay, we are only human in so far as we are 
sensitive, and our honor is precisely in pro-w 
portion to our passion. 

You know I said of that great and pure 
society of the detid that it would allow " no 
vain or vulgar person to enter there." What 
do you think I meant by a ''vulgar" person? 20 
What do you yourselves mean by 'Vulgar- 
ity"? You will find it a fruitful subject of 
thought: but, briefly, the essence of all vul- 
garity lies in want of sensation. Simple and 
innocent vulgarity is merely an untrained 25 

1. Sensation. Ruskin here treats this word in its 
literal significance, — that is, as meaniug the act of re- 
ceiving impressions through the senses. 



76 SESAME AND LILIES. 

and undeveloped bluntness of body and mind ; 
but in true, inbred vulgarity, there is a dread- 
ful callousness which in extremity becomes 
capable of every sort of bestial habit and 

5 crime, without fear, without pleasure, with- 
out horror, and without pity. It is in the 
blunt hand and the dead heart, in the dis- 
eased habit, in the hardened conscience, that 
men become vulgar ; they are forever vulgar, 

10 precisely in proportion as they are incapable 
of sympathy, of quick understanding, of all 
that, in deep insistence on the common but 
most accurate term, may be called the " tact" 
or "touch-faculty" of body and soul; that 

15 tact which the Mimosa has in trees, which the 
pure woman has above all creatures, — fine- 
ness and fulness of sensation, beyond reason, 
the ffuide and sanctifier of reason itself. 
Reason can but determine what is true ; it is 

20 the God-given passion of humanity which 
alone can recognize what God has made good. 

-^A We come, then, to that great concourse of 
the dead, not merely to know from them 
what is true, but chiefly to feel with them 

25 what is just. Now, to feel with them, we 

4. Bestial. Like a beast. 
16. Mimosa. The sensitive plant. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 77 

must be like them ; and none of us can be- 
come that without pains. As the true knowl- 
edge is disciplined and tested knowledge, 
not the first thought that comes, so the true 
passion is disciplined and tested passion, not 
the first passion that comes. The first that ^ 
come are the vain, the false, the treacherous ; 
if you 3deld to them, they will lead you 
wildly and far, in vain pursuit in hollow en- 
thusiasm, till you have no true purpose and 
no true passion left. Not that any feeling ^^ 
possible to humanity is in itself wrong, but 
only wrong when undisciplined. Its nobility 
is in its force and justice ; it is wrong when 
it is weak and felt for paltry cause. There 
is a mean wonder, as of a child who sees a^* 
juggler tossing golden balls, and this is base, 
if you will. But do you think that the won- 
• der is ignoble, or the sensation less, with 
which every human soul is called to w^atch 
the golden balls of heaven tossed through the^ 
night by the hand that made them ? There 
is a mean curiosity, as of a child opening a 
forbidden door, or a servant prying into her 
master's business, and a noble curiosity, 
questioning, in the front of danger, the source^' 
of the great river beyond the sand, the place 



78 SESAME AND LILIES. 

of the great continent beyond the sea ; a 
nobler curiosity still, which questions of the 
River of Life, and of the space of the Conti- 
nent of Heaven — things which "the angels 

5 desire to look into." So the anxiety is 
ignoble with which you linger over the course 
and catastrophe of an idle tale ; but do you 
think the anxiety is less or greater with 
which you watch, or ought to watch, the deal- 

loings of fate and destiny with the life of an 
agonized nation? Alas ! it is the narrowness, 
selfishness, minuteness of your sensation that 
you have to deplore in England at this day, 
— sensation which spends itself in bouquets 

15 and speeches, in revellings and junketings, 
in sham fights and gay puppet-shows, while 
you can look on and see noble nations mur- 
dered, man by man, without an efibrt or a 
tear. 

20 I said "minuteness" and "selfishness" of 
sensation ; but it would have been enough to 
have said "injustice" or "unrighteousness" 
of sensation. For as in nothing is a gentle- 
man better to be discerned from a vulgar 

26 person, so in nothing is a gentle nation (such 

IG. Puppet shows.. Mock dramas performed by pup- 
pets, moved by wires. Puppets are small images in 
the human form. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 79 

nations have been) better to be discerned 
from a mob than in this, — that their feelings 
are constant and just, results of due contem- 
plation, and of equal thought. You can talk 
a mob into anything; its feelings may be, — 5 
usually are, — on the whole, generous and 
right, but it has no foundation for them, no 
hold of them. You may tease or tickle it 
into any at your pleasure ; it thinks by in- 
fection, for the most part, catching an opin-10 
ion like a cold, and there is nothing so little 
that it will not roar itself wild about, when 
the fit is on, nothing so great but it will for- 
get in an hour when the fit is past. But a 
gentleman's, or a gentle nation's, passions are 15 
just, measured, and continuous. A great 
nation, for instance, does not spend its entire 
national wits for a couple of months in weigh- 
ing evidence of a single ruffian's having done 
a single murder, and for a couple of years see 20 
its own children murder each other by their 
thousands or tens of thousands a day, con- 
sidering only what the effect is likely to be 
on the price of cotton, and caring nowise to 
determine which side of battle is in the wrong. 25 

20. For a couple of years^ etc. Seems to refer to 
the Civil War in this country which was in progress 
"When Ruskin was preparing these lectures, 1864. 



80 SESAME AND LILIES. 

Neither does a great nation send its poor 
little boys to jail for stealing six walnuts ; 
and allow its bankrupts to steal their hun- 
dreds of thousands with a bow, and its bank- 

5ers, rich with poor men's savings, to close 
their doors '^ under circumstances over which 
they have no control," with a " by your 
leave " ; and large landed estates to be bought 
by men who have made their money by 

10 going with armed steamers up and down the 
China Seas, selling opium at the cannon's 
mouth, and altering, for the benefit of the 
foreign nation, the common highwayman's 
demand of "your money or your life," into 

15 that of " your money and your life." 

/\\ My friends, I do not know why any of us 

should talk about reading. We want some 

sharper discipline than that of reading, but, 

at all events, be assured, we cannot read. No 

20 reading is possible for a people with its mind 
in this state. No sentence of any great writer 
is intelligible to them. It is simply and 
sternly impossible for the English public at 
this moment to understand any thoughtful 

25 writing, — so incapable of thought has it 

11. Selling opium. See The Opium War in your 
English histories from 1840-1842. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 81 

become in its insanity of avarice. Happily, 
our disease is as yet little worse than this in- 
capacity of thought ; it is not corruption of 
the inner nature : we ring true still, when 
anything strikes home to us ; and though the * 
idea that anything should " pay " has infected 
our purpose so deeply that even when we 
would play the good Samaritan, we never take 
out our twopence and give them to the host 
without saying, "When I come again, thou lo 
shalt give me fourpence," there is a capacity 
of noble passion left in our hearts' core. We 
show it in our work, in our war, even in those 
unjust domestic affections which make us 
furious at a small private wrong, while we are is 
polite to a boundless public one. We are 
still industrious to the last hour of the day, 
though we add the gambler's fury to the 
laborer's patience ; we are still brave to the 
death, though incapable of discerning true 20 
cause for battle, and are still true in affection 
to our own flesh, to the death, as the sea- 
monsters are, and the rock-eagles. And 
there is hope for a nation while this can be 
still said of it. As long as it holds its life in 25 

8. Good Samaritan. Story of the Good Samaritan, 
Luke X., 33. 



82 SESAME AND LILIES. 

its hand, ready to give it for its honor (though 
a foolish honor) , for its love (though a selfish 
love), and for its business (though a base 
business), there is hope for it. But hope 
^only ; for this instinctive, reckless virtue can- 
not last. No nation can last which has made 
a mob of itself, however generous at heart. 
It must discipline its passions and direct 
them, or they will discipline it, one day, with 
10 scorpion-whips. Above all, a nation cannot 
last as a money-making mob ; it cannot with 
impunity, — it cannot with existence, — go on 
despising literature, despising science, de- 
spising art, despising nature, despising cora- 
ls passion, and concentrating its soul on pence. 
Do you think these are harsh or wild words? 
Have patience with me but a little longer. 
I will prove their truth to you, clause by 
clause. 
^20 (a) I say first we have despised literature. 
^''What do we, as a nation, care about books? 
How much do you think we spend altogether 
on our libraries, public or private, as com- 
pared with what we spend on our horses? 
25 If a man spends lavishly on his library, you 

10. Scorpion-whips. Whips sharp like the tail of a 
scorpion. Any severe punishment. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 83 

call him mad, — a bibliomaniac. But you 
never call anyone a horse-maniac, though men 
ruin themselves every day by their horses, 
and you do not hear of people ruining them- 
selves by their books. Or, to go lower still, 6 
how much do you think the contents of the 
book-shelves of the United Kingdom, public 
and private, would fetch, as compared with 
the contents of its wine-cellars ? What posi- 
tion would its expenditure on literature take,io 
as compared with its expenditure on luxu- 
rious eating? We talk of food for the mind 
as of food for the body. Now% a good book 
contains such food inexhaustibly : it is a 
provision for life, and for the best part of us : 15 
yet how long most people would look at the 
best book before they would give the price of 
a large turbot for it ! — though there have 
been men who have pinched their stomachs 
and bared their backs to buy a book, whose 20 
libraries were cheaper to them, I think, in 
the end, than most men's dinners are. We 
are few of us put to such trial, and more is 
the pity ; for indeed, a precious thing is all 
the more precious to us if it has been won by 25 

1. Bibliomaniac. One who has a mania for books. 
See Eugene Field's Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac. 



84 SESAME AND LILIES. 

work or economy. And if public libraries 
were half as costly as public dinners, or 
books cost the tenth part of what bracelets 
do, even foolish men and women might some- 

5 times suspect there was good in reading, as 
well as in munching and sparkling ; whereas 
the very cheapness of literature is making 
even wise people forget that if a book is 
worth reading, it is worth buying. No book 

10 is worth anything which is not worth much; 
nor is it serviceable until it has been read 
and re-read, and loved, and loved again, and 
marked, so that you can refer to the passages 
you want in it, as a soldier can seize the 

15 weapon he needs in an armory, or a housewife 
bring the spice she needs from her store. 
Bread of flour is good, but there is bread, 
sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good 
book; and the family must be poor indeed, 

20 which, once in their lives, cannot for such 
multipliable barley-loaves pay their baker's 
bill. We call ourselves a rich nation, and 
we are filthy and foolish enough to thumb 
each others' books out of circulating libra- 

25ries. 

22. We call ourselves a rich nation, etc. What do 
you think of this sentence in a lecture on books and 
reading? 



SESAMj: AND LILIES. S5 

(b) I say we liaTc despised science. 
"What ! " you exclaim, "are we not foremost 
in all discovery,* and is not the whole world 
giddy by reason, or unreason, of our inven- 
tions ?" Yes, but do you suppose that is* 
national work ? That work is all done in spite 
of the nation, by private people's zeal and 
money. We are glad enough, indeed, to 
make our profit of science. We snap up 
anything in the way of a scientific bone that lo 
has meat on it, eagerly enough ; but if the 
scientific man comes for a bone or a crust 
to us, that is another story. What have we 
publicly done for science ? We are obliged 
to know what o'clock it is, for the safety is 
of our ships, and therefore we pay for an 
observatory ; and we allow ourselves in the 
person of our Parliament, to be annually tor- 
mented into doing something, in a slovenly 
way, for the British Museum, sullenly appre-20 
bending that to be a place for keeping stuffed 
birds in, to amuse our children. If anybody 

* Since this was written, the answer has become deti- 
nitely — No, we having surrendered the field of Arctic 
discovery to ihe Continental nations, as being ourselves 
too poor to pay for ships. 

17. Observatory. The chief use of an observatory is 
to furnish absolutely correct time. Ruskin probably 
had in mind the observatory at Greenwich. 



86 SESAME AND LILIES. 

will pay for their own telescope, and resolve 
another nebula, we cackle over the discern- 
ment as if it were our own. If one in ten 
thousand of our hunting squires suddenly 

5 perceives that the earth was indeed made to 
be something else than a portion for foxes, 
and burrows in it himself and tells us where 
the gold is and where the coals, we under- 
stand that there is some use in that, and very 

w properly knight him ; but is the accident of 
his having found out how to employ himself 
usefully any credit to vs9 (The negation of 
such discovery among his brother squires 
may perhaps be some discredit to us, if we 

15 would consider of it.) But if you doubt 
these generalities, here is one fact for us all 
to meditate upon, illustrative of our love of 
science. Two years ago there was a collec- 
tion of the fossils of Solenhofen to be sold in 

20 Bavaria, — the best in existence, containing 
many specimens unique for perfectness, and 

1. Besolve another nebula. The nebulas, or cloud- 
like patches of light, seen at night — the Milky Way — 
by powerful telescopes are found to be composed of a 
great number of stars. 

4. Squires. C'^uutry gentlemen with whom, in 
England, fox hunting has always been a favorite 
sport. 

8. Coals. Used as we use the word coal. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 87 

one, unique as an example of a species (a 
whole kingdom of unknown living creatures 
being announced by that fossil). This col- 
lection, of which the mere market worth, 
among private buyers, would probably have 6 
been some thousand or twelve hundred 
pounds, was offered to the English nation 
for seven hundred ; but we would not give 
seven hundred, and the whole series would 
have been in the Munich Museum at thisio 
moment, if Professor Owen* had not, with 
loss of his own time, and patient tormenting 
of the British public in person of its repre- 
sentatives, got leave to give four hundred 
pounds at once, and himself become answer- w 
able for the other three, which the said pub- 
lic w411 doubtless pay him eventually, but 
sulkily, and caring nothing about the matter 
all the while, only always ready to cackle if 
any credit comes of it. Consider, I beg of2o 
you, arithmetically, what this fact means. 
Your annual expenditure for public purposes 
(a third of it for military apparatus) is at 

* I state this fact without Professor Owen's permis- 
sion, which of course he could not with propriety have 
granted, had I asked it; but I consider it is so import- 
ant that the public should be aware of the fact, that I 
do what seems to me right, though rude. 



SS SESAME AND LILIES. 

least fifty millions. Now seven hundred 
pounds is to fifty million pounds, roughly, 
as sevenpence is to two thousand pounds. 
Suppose, then, a gentleman of unknown in- 

5 come, but whose wealth was to be conjec- 
tured from the fact that he spent two thou- 
sand a year on his parkwalls and footmen 
only, professes himself fond of science ; and 
that one of his servants comes eagerly to tell 

10 him that an unique collection of fossils, giv- 
ing clue to a new era of creation, is to be had 
for the sum of sevenpence sterling ; and that 
the gentleman, who is fond of science, and 
spends two thousand a year on his park, 

15 answers, after keeping his servant waiting 
several months, "Well, I'll give you four- 
pence for them, if you will be answerable 
for the extra threepence yourself till next 
year!" 
^ U 20 (c')I say you have despised art ! "What !" 
you again answer, " have we not art exhibi- 
bitions, miles long; and do not we pay 
thousands of pounds for single pictures ; and 
have we not art schools and institutions, 

25 more than ever nation had before?" Yes, 
truly, but all that is for the sake of the shop. 
You would fain sell canvas as well as coals. 



^ SESAME AND LILIES. 89 

and crockery as well as iron ; you would 
take every other nation's bread out of its 
- mouth if you could.* Not being able to do 
that, your ideal of life is to stand in the 
thorouo^hfares of the world, like Ludsate & 
apprentices, screaming to every passer-by. 
"What d'ye lack?" You know nothing of 
your own faculties or circumstances. You 
fancy that among your damp, flat, fat fields 
of clay you can have as quick art fancy asio 
the Frenchman among his bronzed vines, or 
the Italian under his volcanic cliffs ; that art 
may be learned as book-keeping is, and 
when learned, will give you more books to 
keep. You care for pictures absolutely no is 
more than you do for the bills pasted on 
your dead walls. There is always room on 
the wall for the bills to be read, — never for 
the pictures to be seen. You do not know 
what pictures you have (by repute) in the 20 

*That was our real idea of " Free Trade" — "All the 
trade to myself." You find now that by "competition " 
other people can manage to sell somethino; as wellMs you 
— and now we call for '' Protection " again. Wretches ! 

1. Crockery. Used here in the sense of pottery. 

5. Ludgate apprentices. This was the common street 
cry of the London apprentices in the vicinity of Lud- 
gate Hill, when soliciting customers for their masters' 
wares. See Scott's Fortunes of Nigel. 



90 SESAME AND LILIES. 

country, nor whether they are false or true, 
nor whether they are taken care of or not ; 
in foreign countries, you calmly see the no- 
blest existing pictures in the world rotting 

sin abandoned wreck (in Venice you saw the 
Austrian guns deliberately pointed at the 
palaces containing them), and if you heard 
that all the Titians in Europe were made 
into sandbags to-morrow on the Austrian 

10 forts, it would not trouble you so much as 
the chance of a brace or two of game less in 
your own bags, in a day's shooting. That is 
your national love of art. 

{dj You have despised Nature ; that is to 

15 say, all the deep and sacred sensations of 
natural scenery. The French revolutionists 
made stables of the cathedrals of France ; 
you have made race courses of the cathedrals 
of the earth. Your one conception of pleas- 

2oure is to drive in railroad carriages round 

their aisles, and eat off their altars.* You 

*I meant that the beautiful places of the world, — 
Switzerland, Italy, South Germany, and so on, — are, 
indeed, the truest cathedrals, — places to be reverent in, 
and to worship in, and that we only care to drive 
through them ; and to eat and drink at their most 
sacred places. 

8. Titians. Paintings by Titian, the great Vene- 
tian colorist, and consequently very valuable paintings. 

9. Sand-haqs. Bags filled with sand or earth and 
used in fortifications. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 91 

have put a railroad-bridge over the falls of 
Schaffhausen. You have tunnelled the cliffs 
of Lucerne by Tell's chapel ; you have de- 
stroyed the Clarens shore of the Lake of 
Geneva ; there is not a quiet valley in Eng- 5 
land that you have not filled with bellowing 
fire ; there is no particle left of English land 
which you have not trampled coal ashes 
into,* — nor any foreign city in which the 
spread of your presence is not marked among lo 
its fair old streets and happy gardens by a 
consuming white leprosy of new hotels and 
perfumer's shops. The Alps themselves, 
which your own poets used to love so rev- 
erently, you look upon as soaped poles in a 15 
bear-garden, which you set yourselves to climb 
and slide down again, with " shrieks of de- 
light ' When you are past shrieking, hav- 
ing no human articulate voice to say you are 

*I was singularly struck, some years ago, by finding 
all the river shore at Richmond, in Yorkshire, black in 
its earth from the mere drift of soot-laden air from 
places many miles away. 

1. Falls of Schaffhausen. Falls of the Rhine at 
Schafthausen, the capital of a Swiss canton of the 
same name. 

3 Tell. William Tell, the peasant hero of Switzer- 
land, who gained renown by killing Gessler. 

8. Coal ashes. Refers to the use of cinders in 
making roadways, etc. 



92 SESAME AND LILIES. 

gljid with, you fill the quietude of their val- 
leys with gunpowder blasts, and rush home 
red with cutaneous eruption of conceit, and 
voluble with convulsive hiccough of self-sat- 

5isfaction. I think nearly the two sorrow- 
fullest spectacles I have ever seen in human- 
ity, taking the deep inner significance of 
them, are the English mobs in the valley of 
Chamouni, amusing themselves with firing 

10 rusty howitzers ; and the Swiss vintagers of 
Zurich, expressing their Christian thanks for 
the gift of the vine by assembling in knots 
in the "towers of the vineyards," and slowly 
loading and firing horse-pistols from morn- 

ising till evening. It is pitiful to have dim 
conceptions of duty; more pitiful, it seems 
to me, to have conceptions like these of 

/ mirth. 
'}y^ All these pleasures then, and all these 

3. Cutaneous. Referring to the skin. Not deep — 
" skin deep." 

5. Sorrowfullest. Ruskin often forms the superla- 
tive of words of this sort by adding eat instead of using 
most. 

9. Chamouni. (sha-mo-ne'.) A peak of the Alps in 
Eastern France, not far south of Lake Geneva. 

10. Howitzers. Light cannon. 

11. Zurich. (zo'rik.)An important town of Swit- 
zerland. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 93 

virtues, I repeat, you nationally despise. 
You have, indeed, men among you who do 
not ; by whose work, by whose strength, by 
whose life, by whose death, you live and 
never thank them. Your wealth, your amuse- * 
ment, your pride, would all be alike impos- 
sible, but for those whom you scorn or for- 
get. The policeman, who is walking up and 
down the black lane all night to watch the 
guilt you have created there, and may haveio 
his brains beaten out, and be maimed for 
life, at any moment, and never be thanked ; 
the sailor wrestling with the sea's rage ; the 
quiet student poring over his book or his 
vial; the common worker, without praise, 15 
and nearly without bread, fulfilling his task 
as your horses drag your carts, hopeless, 
and spurned of all : these are the men by 
whom England lives ; but they are not the 
nation ; they are only the body and nervous 20 
force of it, acting still from old habit in a 
convulsive perseverance, while the mind is 
gone. Our national wish and purpose are 
only to be amused ; our national religion is 
the performance of church ceremonies, and 25 

15. Vial. Referring to experiments in chemistry 
wbere vials, small bottles, are so much in use. 



94 SESAME AND LILIES. 

preaching of soporific truths (or untruths) to 
keep the mob quietly at work, while we 
amuse ourselves ; and the necessity for this 
amusement is fastening on u.s, as a feverous 

6 disease of parched throat and wandering eyes 
— senseless, dissolute, merciless. How lit- 
erally that word cZzs-ease, the negation and 
possibility of ease, expresses the entire 
moral state of our English industry and its 

10 amusements. 

When men are rightly occupied, their 
amusement grows out of their work, as the 
color-petals out of a fruitful flower ; when 
they are faithfully helpful and compassionate, 

15 all their emotions become steady, deep, per- 
petual, and vivifying to the soul as the nat- 
ural pulse to the body. But now, having no 
true business, we pour our whole masculine 
energy into the false business of money-mak- 

2oing; and having no true emotion, we must 
have false emotions dressed up for us to play 
with, not innocently, as children with dolls, 
but guiltily and darkly, as the idolatrous 
Jews with their pictures on cavern walls, 

25 which men had to dig to detect. The justice 
we do not execute, we mimic in the novel 
16. Vivifying. Life-giving. 



SESAME AND LILJES. 95 

and on the stage ; for the beauty we destroy 
in Nature, we substitute the metamorphosis 
of the pantomine, and (the human nature of 
us imperatively requiring awe and sorrow of 
some kind) for the noble grief we should 5 
have borne with our fellows, and the pure 
tears we should have wept with them, we 
gloat over the pathos of the police court, and 
gather the night-dew of the grave. 
.^O Tt is difficult to estimate the true signifi-io 
cance of these things ; the facts are frightful 
enough. The measure of national fault in- 
volved in them is, perhaps, not as great as it 
would at first seem. We permit or cause 
thousands of deaths daily, but we mean noi* 
harm ; we set fire to houses and ravage peas- 
ants' fields, yet we should be sorry to find 
we had injured anybody. We are still kind 
at heart ; still capable of virtue, but only as 
children are. Chalmers, at the end of his 20 
long life, having had much power with the 
public, being plagued in some serious matter 
by a reference to "public opinion," uttered 

2. Metamorphosis. Cnange of form, transforma- 
tion. 

14. We permit, etc. Show how we do the things 
enumerated in these lines. 

20. Chalmers. A noted Scotch divine. 



96 SESAME AND LILIES. 

the impatient exclamation, "The public is 
just a great baby !" And the reason that I 
have allowed all these graver subjects of 
thought to mix themselves up with an inquiry 

6 into methods of reading is, that the more I 
see of our national faults or miseries, the 
more they resolve themselves into conditions 
of childish illiterateness and want of educa- 
tion in the most ordinary habits of thought. 

10 It is, I repeat, not vice, not selfishness, not 
dulness of brain, which we have to la- 
ment ; but an unreachable schoolboy's reck- 
lessness, only differing from the true school- 
boy's in its incapacity of being helped, 

15 because it acknowledges no master. 

f There is a curious type of us given in one 
of the lovely, neglected works of the last of 
our great painters. It is a drawing of Kirkby 
Lonsdale churchyard, and of its brook and 

20 valley and hills and folded moridng sky be- 
yond. And unmindful alike of these, and of 
the dead who have left these for other valleys 

3. / have allowed all these graver subjects, etc. Is it 
excusable in a literary work of this sort to digress so 
far from the main subject? Give reason for your 
answer. 

18. Kirkby Lonsdale. Near Hawes Water, or lake, 
in the north of England, on Lord Lonsdale's estate. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 97 

and for other skies, a group of schoolboys 
have piled their little books upon a grave, to 
strike them ofl* with stones. So , also, we 
play with the words of the dead that would 
teach us, and strike them far from us with & 
our bitter, reckless will ; little thinking that 
those leaves which the wind scatters had 
been piled, not only upon a gravestone, but 
upon the seal of an enchanted vault — nay, the 
gate of a great city of sleeping kings, whoio 
would awake for us, and walk with us, if we 
knew but how to call them by their names. 
How often, even if we lift the marble en- 
trance gate, do we but wander among those 
old kings in their repose, and finger the 15 
robes they lie in, and stir the crowns on 
their foreheads ; and still they are silent to us, 
and seem but a dusty imagery, because we 
know not the incantation of the heart that 
would wake them, which, if they once heard, 20 
they would start up to meet us in their 
power of long ago, narrowly to lock upon 
lis, and consider us ; and as the fallen kings 



18. Imagery. Here used in the sense of things 
imagined. 

19. Incantation. The act or process of using words, 
sung or spoken, to invoke spirits, enchantment. 



98 SESAME AND LILIES. 

of Hades meet the newly fallen, saying, 
"Art thou also become weak as we, — art 
thou also become one of us ? " so would these 
kings, with their undimmed, unshaken dia- 

ftdems, meet us, saying, "Art thou also be- 
come pure and mighty of heart as we, — art 
thou also become one of us ? " 

l^'^^ Mighty of heart, mighty of mind — mag- 
nanimous — to be this, is, indeed, to be great 

10 in life; to become this increasingly, is, in- 
deed, to "advance in life," — in life itself, 
not in the trappings of it. My friends, do 
you remember that old Scythian custom, 
when the head of a house died? How he 

15 was dressed in his finest dress, and set in his 
chariot, and carried about to his friends' 
houses ; and each of them placed him at his 
table's head, and all feasted in his presence? 
Suppose it were, offered to you in plain words, 

20 as it is offered to you in dire facts, that you 
should gain this Scythian honor gradually, 
while y( u yet thought yourself alive. Sup- 

1. Hades. The invisible world of spirits where 
Hades or Pluto is said to rule. 

8. Magnanimous. Great of mind, elevated in soul 
or sentiment. 

13. Scythian. Scythia, in ancient geography, was the 
great indefinite region north of the Black Sea. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 99 

pose the offer were this: You shall die slowly ; 
your blood shall daily grow cold, your flesh 
petrify, your heart beat at last only as a 
rusted group of iron valves. Your life shall 
fjide from you, and sink through the earth 5 
into the ice of Caina ; but day by day your 
body shall be dressed more gayly, and set in 
higher chariots, and have more orders on its 
breast — crowns on its head, if you will. 
Men shall bow before it, stare and shout 10 
round it, crowd after it up and down the 
streets ; build palaces for it ; feast with it at 
their table's head all the night long. Your 
soul shall stay enough within it to know 
what they do, and feel the weight of the 15 
golden dress on its shoulders, and the fur- 
row of the crown-edge on the skull — no 
more. Would you take the offer verbally 
made by the death-angel ? Would the mean- 
est among us take it, think you? Yet prac-20 
tically and verily we grasp at it, every one 
of us, in a measure ; many of us grasp at it 
in its fulness of horror. Every man accepts 
it who desires to advance in life without 
knowing what life is; who means only that 25 

6. Caina. An ice-ribbed region in Dante's hell. 
8. Orders. Decorations, badges of honor. 

u Or C» 



100 SESAME AND LILIES. 

he has to get more horses and more footmen 
and more fortune and more public honor, and 
— not more personal soul. He is only ad- 
vancing in life whose heart is getting softer, 
whose blood warmer, whose brain quicker, 
whose spirit is entering into living* peace. 
And the men who have this life in them are 
the true lords or kings of the earth — they, 
and they only. All other kingships, so 

10 far as they are true, are only the practical 
issue and expression of theirs ; if less than 
this, they are either dramatic royalties, — 
costly shows, set off, indeed, with real jewels 
instead of tinsel, but still only the toys of 

lunations, — or else they are no royalties at all, 
but tyrannies, or the mere active and prac- 
tical issue of national folly ; for which reason 
I have said of them elsewhere, " Visible gov- 
ernments are the toys of some nations, the 

20 diseases of others, the harness of some, the 
burdens of more." 

>>, ^ But I have no words for the wonder with 
which 1 hear kinghood still spoken of, even 

* TO Se <^p6vr\(i.a rov irvev/aaTO? fcorj kox elprivrf. 

Romans viii., 6. "To be spiritually minded is life 
and peace." 

1. Footmen. Men-servants in livery. 

20. Harness. Armor, in this connection. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 101 

among thoughtful men, as if governed nations 

were a personal property, and might be 

bought and sold, or otherwise acquired, as 

sheep, of whose flesh their king was to feed, 

and whose fleece he was to gather ; as if ^ 

Achilles' indignant epithet of base kings, 

" people-eating", were the constant and proper 

title of all monarchs ; and enlargement of 

a king's dominion meant the same thing as 

the increase of a private man's estate ! Kings lo 

who think so, however powerful, can no more 

be the true kings of the nation than gadflies 

are the kings of a horse ; they suck it, and 

may drive it wild, but do not guide it. They 

and their courts and their armies are, if onei* 

could see clearly, only a large species of 

marsh mosquito, with bayonet proboscis and 

melodious, bandmastered, trumpeting in the 

summer air; the twilight being, perhaps, 

sometimes fairer, but hardly more wholesome, 20 

for its glittering mists of midge companies. 

The true kings, meanwhile, ruled quietly, if 

at all, and hate ruling; too many of them 

make ^7 gran refiuto; and if they do not, the 

6. Achilles. Famous Greek hero of the Iliad. 
21. Midge. Here used as an adjective and means 
composed of myriads of very tiny flies. 
24. 11 gran refiuto. A grand renunciation. 



102 SESAME AND LILIES. 

mob as soon as they are likely to become use- 
ful to it, is pretty sure to make its gran refiuto 
of them, 
U- -* Yet the visible king may also be a true one 
5 some day, if ever day comes when he will 
estimate his dominion by the force of it, — not 
the geographical boundaries. It matters very 
little whether Trent cuts you a cantel out 
here, or Rhine rounds you a castle less there ; 

10 but it does matter to you, king of men, 
whether you can verily say to this man," Go," 
and he goeth, and to another, " Come," and 
he Cometh. Whether you can turn your 
people as you can Trent ; and where it is that 

15 you bid them come, and where go. It mat- 
ters to you, king of men, whether your peo- 
ple hate you, and die by you, or love you, 
and live by you. You may measure your 
dominion by multitudes, better than by 

20 miles : and count degrees of love-latitude, not 
from, but to, a wonderfully warm and infinite 
equator. 

8. Treiit. The River Trent. 

8. Cantel. A corner or piece. 

9. Bhine. The banks of the Rhine are noted for 
their castles. 

21. Infinite equator. Analyze the figure which ends 
■with these words. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 103 

Measure! — nay, you cannot measure. 
Who shall measure the difference between the 
power of those who "do and teach," and who 
are greatest in the kingdoms of earth, as of 
heaven, and the power of those who undo and ^ 
consume, whose powder, at the fullest, is only 
the power of the moth and the rust ? Strange ! 
to think how the Moth-kings lay up treasures 
for the moth ; and the Kust-kings, who are to 
their people's strength as rust to armor, lay^o 
up treasures for the rust ; and the Robber- 
kings, treasures for the robber; but how few 
kings have ever laid up treasures that needed 
no cruardinof — of which the more thieves 
there were the better! Broidered robe, only is 
to be rent ; helm and sword, only to be 
dimmed ; jewel and gold, only to be scattered ; 
— there have been three kinds of kings who 
have gathered these. Suppose there ever 
should arise a fourth order of kings who had 20 
read in some obscure writing of long ago 
that there was a fourth kind of treasure which 
the jewel and gold could not equal, neither 
should it be valued with pure gold. A web 
made fair in the weaving by Athena's shuttle ; 25 

^5. Athena's shuttle. Athena was the chief goddess 
of the Greeks. She had, among other accomplishments, 
great skill as a weaver. See story of Arachue. 



104 SESAME AND LILIES. 

an armor forged in divine fire by Vulcahian 
force ; a gold to be mined in the very sun's 
red heart, where he sets over the Delphian 
cliffs, — deep-pictured tissue, impenetrable 

6 armor, potable gold, the three great Angels 
of Conduct. Toil and Thought, still calling 
to us, and waiting at the post of our doors, 
to lead us with their winged power, and guide 
us with their unerring eyes, by the path 

10 which no fowl knoweth, and which the vul- 
ture's eye has not seen ! Suppose kings 
should ever arise who heard and believed this 
word, and at last gathered and brought forth 
treasures of Wisdom for their people. 

16 Think what an amazing business that would 
be ! How inconceivable in the state of our 
present national wisdom ! That we should 
bring up our peasants to a book exercise 
instead of a bayonet exercise ! — organize, drill, 

20 maintain with pay and good generalship, 
armies of thinkers, instead of armies of stab- 

1. Vulcanian force. Referring to Vulcau, the 
worker in metals, among the Greek gods. 

3. Delphian cliffs. Delphi, the seat of the famous 
Greek oracle, is in the rocky region just north of the 
Corinthian gulf. 

5. Potable. Liquid flowing 

11. Vulture's eye. Job xxviii., 7. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 105 

bers ! — fine national amusement in reading- 
rooms as well as rifle-grounds ; give prizes 
for a fair shot at a fact, as well as for a leaden 
plash on a target. What an absurd idea it 
seems, put fairly in words, that the wealth » 
of the capitalists of civilized nations should 
ever come to support literature instead of 
war ! 

Have yet patience with me while I read 
you a single sentence out of the only book, lo 
properly to be called a book, that T have yet 
written myself, the one that will stand (if 
anything stand) surest and longest of all 
work of mine : 

'' It is one very awful form of the operation of wealth 15 
in Europe that it is entirely capitalists' wealth which 
supports unjust wars. Just wars do not need so much 
money to support them ; for most of the men w^ho 
wage such, wage them gratis; but for an unjust war, 
men's bodies and souls have both to be bought, and the 20 
best tools of war for them besides, wh'ch makes such 
war costly to the maximum ; not to speak of the cost of 
base fear and angry suspicion between nations which 
have not grace nor honesty enough in all their multi- 
tudes to buy an hour's peace of mind with; as, at pres-25 
ent, France and England, purchasing of each other ten 
millions' sterling worth of consternation, annually (a 
remarkably light crop, half thorns and half aspen 
leaves, sown, reaped, and granaried by the '• science ' of 

22. Maximum. Greatest degree. 



106 SESAME AND LILIES. 

the modern political economist, teaching covetoiisness 
instead of truth). And all unjust war being support- 
able, if not 1 y pillage of the enemy, only by loans from 
capitalists, these loans are repaid by subsequent taxa- 
stion of the people who appear to have no will in the 
matter, the capitalists' will being the primary root of 
the war; but its real root is the covetousness of the 
whole nation, rendering it incapable of faith, frankness, 
• or justice, and bringing about, therefore, in due time, 
10 his own separate loss and punishment to each person." 

\jf) France and England literally, observe, buy 
panic of each other ; they pay, each of them, 
for ten thousand-thousand pounds' worth of 
terror, a year. Now suppose, instead of 

15 buying these ten millions' worth of panic 
annually, they made up their minds to be at 
peace with each other, and buy ten millions' 
worth of knowledge annually ; and that each 
nation spent its ten thousand-thousand pounds 

20 a year in founding royal libraries, roj'-al art 
galleries, royal museums, royal gardens, and 
places of rest. Might it not be better some- 
what for both French and English ? 

It will be long, yet, before that comes to 

25 pass. Nevertheless, I hope it will not be 

3. Pillage. Robbery by open violence 

25. Nevertheless 1 hope, etc. Is Ruskin consistent 
here with a former passage where he says, "We are 
filthy and foolish enough to thumb each others' books"? 



SESAME AND LILIES. 107 

long before royal or national libraries will be 
founded in every considerable city, with a 
royal series of books in them ; the same 
series in every one of them, chosen books, 
the best in every kind, prepared for that 5 
national series in the most perfect way pos- 
sible ; their text printed all on leaves of equal 
size, broad of margin, and divided into pleas- 
ant volumes, light in the hand, beautiful, and 
strong, and thorough as examples of binders' 10 
work ; and that these great libraries will be 
accessible to all clean and orderly persons at 
all times of the day and evening ; strict law 
being enforced for this cleanliness and quiet- 
ness. 15 

I could shape for you other plans, for art 
galleries, and for natural history galleries, 
and for many precious — many, it seems to 
me, needful — things; but this book plan is 
the easiest and needfulest, and would prove 20 
a considerable tonic to what we call our Brit- 
ish Constitution, which has fallen dropsical 
of late, and has an evil thirst and evil 
hunger, and wants healthier feeding. You 
have got its corn laws repealed for it ; try if 25 

2L Tonic. That which gives vigor of action. 



108 SESAME AND LILIES. 



you cannot get corn laws established for it, 
dealing in a better bread — bread made of 
that old enchanted Arabian grain , thesesame 
which opens doors — doors, not of robbers', 
6 but of Kings' Treasuries. 

1. Corn laws. Laws which imposed a heavy tax 
on all grains imported into England, thus making bread 
high and causing great distress among the poor. These 
laws were finally repealed in 1869. 

3. Sesame. Now that you have read this essay 
carefully, give any reason you can why Ruskin gave it 
the name, '' Sesame : of Kings' Treasuries." 



LECTURE II. 

j' 

Xllies : 
or queens' gardens. 

Be thou glad, oh, thirsting desert; let the desert be 
made cheerful, and bloom as the lily ; and the barren 5 
places of Jordan shall run wild with wood. — /saia/i 
XXXV. 1. (Septuagint.) 

It will, perhaps, be well, as this Lecture 
is the sequel of one previously given, that I 
should shortly state to you my general inten- 10 
tion in both. The questions specially pro- 
posed to you in the first, namely, How and 
What to Read, rose out of a far deeper 
one, which it was my endeavor to make 
you propose earnestly to yourselves, namely, is 

2. Lilies: of Queens' Gardens. Ruskin says in 
his second preface to Sesame and Lilies: ^' I 
wrote ' Lilies ' to please one girl ; and were it not 
for what I remember of her, and of few besides, should 
now recast some of the sentences." The "one girl" 
was the "Rosie" of his Frceterita whom, child and 
woman, he loved and who was dead when he revised 
this essay in 1875. 

7. Septuagint. A Greek version of the Old Testa- 
ment, so called, because it was supposed to have been 
made by seventy, or seventy-two, translators. Some- 
times spoken of as the LXX. 

9. Sequel. That which follows, a succeeding part. 

109 



110 SESAME AND LILIES. 

Why to Read. I want you to feel, with me, 
that whatever advantage we possess in the 
present day in the diffusion of education and 
of literature, can only be rightly used by 

ft any of us when we have apprehended clearly 
what education is to lead to, and literature 
to teach. I wish you to see that both well- 
directed moral training and well-chosen read- 
ing lead to the possession of a power over 

10 the ill-guided and illiterate, which is, accord- 
ing to the measure of it, in the truest 
sense Mnglij ; conferring indeed the purest 
kingship that can exist among men Too 
many other kingships (however distinguished 

15 by visible insignia or material power) being 
either spectral, or tyrannous ; spectral — that 
is to say, aspects and shadows only of 
royalty, hollow as death, and which only the 
" likeness of a kingly crown have on " ; or else 

20 tyrannous — that is to say, substituting their 
own will for the law of justice and love by 
which all true kings rule. 

There is, then, I repeat (and as I want to 
leave this idea with you, I begin with it, and 

25 shall end with it) only one pure kind of 

15. Insignia. Distinguishing marks of authority or 
office. 



SESAME AND LILIES. Ill 



/ 



kingship, — an inevitable and eternal kind, 
crowned or not, — the kingship, namely, 
which consists in a stronger moral state and 
a truer thoughtful state than that of others, 
enabling you, therefore, to guide or to raise 5 
them. Observe that word " state " ; we have 
got into a loose way of using it. It means 
literally the standing and stability of a thing ; 
and you have the full force of it in the 
derived word '' statue " — " the immovable 10 
thing." A king's majesty or "state," then 
and the right of his kingdom to be called a 
State, depends on the movelessness of both, 
— without tremor, without quiver of bal- 
ance, established and enthroned upon a 15 
foundation of eternal law which nothing can 
alter nor overthrow. 

Believing that all literature and all educa- 
tion are only useful so far as they tend to 
confirm this calm, beneficent, and therefore^o 
kingly, power, — first over ourselves, and, 
through ourselves, over all around us, — I 
am now going to ask you to consider with 
me further, what special portion or kind of 
this royal authority, arising out of noble ed-25 
ucation, may rightly be possessed by women ; 
and how far they also are called to a true 



112 SESAME AND LILIES. 

queenly power, — not in their liouseholds 
merely, but over all within their sphere. And 
in what sense, if they rightly understood and 
exercised this royal or gracious influence, the 

^ order and beauty induced by such benignant 
power would justify us in speaking of the 
territories over which each of them reigned 
as *' Queens' Gardens." 

And here, in the very outset, we are met 

10 by a far deeper question, which — strano^e 
though this may seem — remains among many 
of us yet quite undecided, in spite of its 
infinite importance. 

We cannot determine what the queenly 

i'"* power of women should be until we are 
agreed what their ordinary power should be. 
We cannot consider how education may fit 
them for any widely extending duty until we 
are agreed what is their true constant duty. 

20 And there never was a time when wilder 
words were spoken, or more vain imagina- 
tion permitted, respecting this question — 
quite vital to all social happiness. The re- 
lations of the womanly to the manly nature, 

25 their different capacities of intellect or of 
virtue, seem never to have been yet esti- 
21. Vain. Here used as useless. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 113 

mated with entire consent. We hear of the 
*< mission" and of the " rights" of Woman, 
as if these could ever be separate from the 
mission and the rights of Man, — as if she 
and her lord were creatures of independent 5 
kind, and of irreconcilable claim. This, at 
least, is wrong. And not less wrong — per- 
haps even more foolishly wrong (for I will 
anticipate thus far what I hope to prove )■=- 
is the idea that woman is only the shadow k, 
and attendant image of her lord, owing him 
a thoughtless and servile obedience, and 
supported altogether in her weakness, by the 
pre-eminence of his fortitude. 

This, I say, is the most foolish of all errors 
respecting her who was made to be the help- 
mate of man. As if he could be helped ef- 
fectively by a shadow, or worthily by a slave ! 

Let us try, then, whether we cannot get 

at some clear and harmonious idea fit must 

20 

be harmonious if it is true) of what womanly 
mind and virtue are in power and office, with 
respect to man's ; and how their relations, 
rightly accepted, aid and increase the vigor 
and honor and authority of both. 

6. Irreconcilable. Not possible to reconcile or to 
harmonize. 



114 SESAME AND LILIES. 

And now I must repeat one thing I said in 
the last lecture ; namely, that the first use of 
education was to enable us to consult with 
the wisest and the greatest men on all points 

5 of earnest difficulty. That to use books 
rightly, was to go to them for help ; to appeal 
to them when our own knowledge and power 
of thought failed ; to be led by them into 
wider sight, purer conception, than our own, 

10 and receive from them the united sentence of 
the judges and councils of all time, against 
our solitary and unstable opinion. 

Let us do this now. Let us see whether 
the greatest, the wisest, the purest-hearted of 

16 all ages, are agreed in any wise on this point ; 
let us hear the testimony they have left 
respecting what they held to be the true dig- 
nity of woman, and her mode of help to man. 
And first let us take Shakespeare. 

20 Note broadly in the outset, Shakespeare 
has no heroes ; he has only heroines. There 
is not one entirely heroic figure in all his 
plays, except the slight sketch of Henry the 
Fifth, exaggerated for the purposes of the 

25 stage ; and the still slighter Valentine in " The 
Two Gentlemen of Verona." In his labored 
and perfect plays you have no hero. Othello 



SESAME AND LILIES. 115 

would have been one if his simplicity had not 
been so great as to leave him the prey of 
every base practice round him ; but he is the 
only example even approximating to the heroic 
type. Coriolanus, Caesar, Antony, stand in s 
flawed strength, and fall by their vanities ; 
Hamlet is indolent, and drowsily speculative ; 
Romeo, an impatient boy; the Merchant of 
Venice, languidly submissive to adverse for- 
tune ; Kent, in "King Lear," is entirely lo 
noble at heart, but too rough and unpol- 
ished to be of true use at the critical time, 
and he sinks into the office of a servant only. 
Orlando, no less noble, is yet the despairing 
toy of Chance, followed, comforted, saved, is 
by Rosalind. Whereas there is hardly a 
play that has not a perfect woman in it, stead- 
fast in grave hope and errorless purpose : 
Cordelia, Desdemona, Isabella, Hermione, 
Imogen, Queen Catherine, Perdita, Sylvia, 
Viola, Rosalind, Helena, and last, and perhaps 

4. Approximating. Approaching near to. 

7. Speculative. Theoretical, not established by 
demonstration. 

14. Orlando. The hero of Shakespeare's As You 
Like It. 

16. Bosalind,^ Cordelia, etc. Heroines from Shakes- 
peare's dramas. 



116 SESAME AND LILIES. 

loveliest, Virgilia, are all faultless ; conceived 
in the highest heroic type of humanity. 
Then observe, secondly. 
The catastrophe of every play is caused 

6 always by the folly or fault of a man; the 
redemption, if there be any, is by the wisdom 
and virtue of a woman, and failing that, there 
is none. The catastrophe of King Lear is 
owing to his own want of judgment, his 

10 impatient vanity, his misunderstanding of his 
children ; the virtue of his one true daughter 
would have saved him from all the injuries of 
the others, unless he had cast her away from 
him ; as it is, she all but saves him. 

16 Of Othello I need not trace the tale ; nor 
the one weakness of his so mighty love ; nor 
the inferiority of his perceptive intellect to 
that even of the second woman character in 
the play, the Emilia who dies in wild testi- 

20 mony against his error : — 

'' murderous coxcomb ! what should such a fool 
Do with so good a wife? " 

In "Romeo and Juliet," the wise and brave 
stratagem of the wife is brought to ruinous 

4. Catastrophe. The final event in a romance or 
tragedy. 

21. Coxcomb. Here means fool. See Othello, v., 2. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 117 

issue by the reckless impatience of her 

husband. In " Winter's Tale," and in "Cym- 

beline," the happiness and existence of two 

princely households, lost through long years, 

and imperilled to the death by the folly and 5 

obstinacy of the husbands, are redeemed at 

last by the queenly patience and wisdom of 

the wives. In "Measure for Measure," the 

foul injustice of the judge and the foul 

cowardice of the brother are opposed to the 10 

victorious truth and adamantine purity of 

a woman. In " Coriolanus," the mother's 

counsel, acted upon in time, would have 

saved her son from all evil ; his momentary 

forgetfulness of it is his ruin. Her prayer, 15 

at last granted, saves him — not, indeed, 

from death, but from the curse of living as 

the destroyer of his country. 

And what shall I say of Julia, constant 

against the fickleness of a lover who is ago 

mere wicked child? — of Helena, against 

the petulance and insult of a careless youth ? 

— of the patience of Hero, the passion of 

Beatrice, and the calmly devoted wisdom of 

19. Julia. From Two Gentlemen of Verona. 

21. Helena, From AlVs Well that Ends Well. 

23. Hero. From Much Ado About Nothing. 

24. Beatrice. From Much Ado About Nothing. 



118 SESAME AND LILIES. 

the "unlessoned girl," who appears among 
the helplessness, the blindness, and the vin- 
dictive passions of men, as a gentle angel, 
bringing courage and safety by her presence, 

5 and defeating the worst malignities of crime 
by what women are fancied most to fail in, 
— precision and accuracy of thought ? 

* Observe, further, among all the principal 
figures in Shakespeare's plays there is only 

w one weak woman — Ophelia ; and it is 
because she fails Hamlet at the critical 
moment, and is not, and cannot in her nature 
be a guide to him when he needs her most, 
that all the bitter catastrophe follows. Fi- 

iBually, though there are three wicked women 
among the principal figures. Lady Macbeth, 
Kegan, and Goneril, they are felt at once to 
be frightful exceptions to the ordinary laws 
of life : fatal in their influence also, in pro- 

20 portion to the power for good which they 
have abandoned. 

. Such, in broad light, is Shakespeare's 
testimony to the position and character of 
women in human life. He represents them 

10. Ophelia. Daughter of Poloaius and sweetheart 
of Hamlet in the play of Hamlet. 

17. Regan and Goneril. The two wicked daughters 
of King Lear. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 119 

as infallibly faithful and wise counsellors, — 
incorruptibly just and pure examples, — 
strong always to sanctify, even when they 
cannot save. 

Not in any wise comparable in knowledge s 
of the nature of man, — still less in his under- 
standing of the causes and courses of fate, — 
but only as the writer who has given us the 
broadest view of the conditions and modes 
of ordinary thought in modern society, I askio 
you next to receive the witness of Walter 
Scott. 

I put aside his merely romantic prose 

writings as of no value ; and though the 

early romantic poetry is very beautiful, its 15 

testimony is of no weight, other than that of 

a boy's ideal. But his true works, studied in 

from Scottish life, bear a true witness ; and in 

the whole range of these, there are but three 

men who reach the heroic type* — Dandiew 

♦ I ought, in order to make this assertion fully under- 
stood, to have noted the various weaknesses which 
lower the ideal of other great characters of men in the 
Waverly novels, — the selfishness and narrowness of 
thought in Redgauntlet, the weak religious enthusiasm 
in Edward Glendenning, and the like; and I ought to 
have noticed that there are several quite perfect char- 
acters sketched sometimes in the backgrounds; three — 
let us accept joyously this courtesy to England and her 
soldiers — are English officers: Colonel Gardiner, Col- 
onel Talbot, and Colonel Mannering. 



120 SESAME AND LILIES. 

Dinmont, Rob Roy, and Claverhouse ; of 
these, one is a border farmer ; another a 
free-booter ; the third a soldier in a bad 
cause. And these touch the ideal of heroism 

6 only in their courage and faith, together with 
a strong, but uncultivated or mistakenly ap- 
plied intellectual power ; while his younger 
men are the gentlemanly playthings of fan- 
tastic fortune, and only by aid (or accident) 

10 of that fortune, survive, not vanquish, the 
trials they involuntarily sustain. Of any 
disciplined or consistent character, earnest 
in a purpose wisely conceived, or dealing 
with forms of hostile evil, definitely chal- 

islenged and resolutely subdued, there is no 
trace in his conceptions of young men. 
Whereas, in his imaginations of women, — 
in the characters of Ellen Douglas, of Flora 
Maclvor, Rose Bradwardine, Catherine Sey- 

1. Dandie Dinmont. From Scott's novel of Guy 
Mannering. 

1. Boh Boy. The hero of Scott's novel of the 
same name. 

1. Claverhouse. Viscount Dundee, John Graham 
of Claverhouse. Defender of the Covenanters at Both- 
well Bridge. Introduced into Scott's Old Mortality. 

18. Ellen Douglas., Flora Mclvor, etc. Heroines 
from Scott's poems and novels. What can you say of 
the propriety of Ruskin praising them to an equal extent 
with Shakespeare's heroines? 



SESAME AND LILIES. 121 

ton, Diana Vernon, Lilias Redgauntlet, Alice 
Bridgenorth, Alice Lee, and Jeanie Deans, — 
with endless varieties of grace, tenderness, 
and intellectual power, we find in all a quite 
infallible sense of dignity and justice ; a fear- s 
less, instant, and untiring self-sacrifice to 
even the appearance of duty, much more to 
its real claims ; and finally, a patient wisdom 
of deeply-restrained aftection, which does 
infinitely more than protect its objects fromio 
a momentary error ; it gradually forms, ani- 
mates, and exalts the characters of the un- 
worthy lovers, until at the close of the tale, 
we are just able, and no more, to take 
patience in hearing of their unmerited success, i^ 

So that in all cases, with Scott as with 
Shakespeare, it is the woman who watches 
over, teaches and guides the youth ; it is 
never, by any chance, the youth who watches 
over or educates his mistress. 20 

[y I' 'Next take, though more briefly, graver 
testimony, — that of the great Italians and 
Greeks. You know well the plan of Dante's 
great poem — that it is a love-poem to his 
dead lady ; a song of praise for her watch 25 
5. Infallible. Not capable of erring. 
25. Dead lady. Beatrice. 



122 SESAME AND LILIES. 

over his soul. Stooping only to pity, never 
to love, she yet saves him from destruction — 
saves him from hell. He is o^oins^ eter- 

nally astray in despair ; she comes down from 

5 heaven to his help, and throughout the as- 
cents of Paradise is his teacher, interpreting 
for him the most difficult truths. Divine and 
human, and leading him, with rebuke upon 
rebuke, from star to star. 

10 I do not insist upon Dante's conception ; 
if I began I could not cease ; besides, you 
might think this a wild imagination of one 
poet's heart. So I will rather read to you a 
few verses of the deliberate writing of a 

15 knight of Pisa to his living lady, wholly 
characteristic of the feeling of all the noblest 
men of the thirteenth or early fourteenth 
century, preserved among many other such 
records of knightly honor and love, which 

20 Dante Rossetti has gathered for us from 
among the early Italian poets. 

15. Knight. A youug servant or follower, a mili- 
tary attendant. 

15. Pisa, (pe' sa.) A city of Italy near the mouth of 
the river Arno and noted for its leaning tower and other 
beautiful buildings. 

20. Dante JRossetti. One of a famous literary family 
of the nineteenth century. Dante Rossetti was a pre- 
Raphaelite painter as well as an exquisite poet. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 123 

^' For lo ! thy law is passed 
Tbat this my love should manifestly be 

To serve and honor thee ; 
And so I do ; and my delight is full, 
Accepted for the servant of thy rule. 5 

"Without almost, I am all rapturous, 

Since thus my will was set : 
To serve, thou flower of joy, thine excellence ; 
Nor ever seems it anything could rouse 

A pain or a regret. lO 

But on thee dwells my every thought and sense ; 
Considering that from thee all virtues spread 

As from a fountain head, — 
That in thy (lift is wisdom's best avails 

And honor without faV ; 15 

With whom each sovereign good dwells separate, 
Fulfilling the perfection of thy state. 

" Lady, since I conceived 
Thy pleasurable aspect in my heart. 

My life has been apnrt 20 

In shining brightness and the place of truth ; 

Which till that time, good sooth, 
Groped among shadows in a darkened place. 

Where many hours and days 
It hardly ever had remembered good. 25 

But now my servitude 
Is thine, and I am full of joy and rest. 

A man from a wild beast 
Thou madest me, since for thy love I lived." 

You may think, perhaps, a Greek knight 3^ 

would have had a lower estimate of women 

22. Sooth. Truth. 

26. Servitude. Used here in the sense of service. 



124 SESAME AND LILIES. 

than this Christian lover. His spiritual sub- 
jection to them was indeed not so absolute ; 
but as regards their own personal character, 
it was only because you could not have fol- 

5 lowed me so easily, that I did not take the 
Greek women instead of Shakespeare's ; and 
instance, for chief ideal types of human 
beauty and faith, the simple mother's and 
wife's heart of Andromache ; the divine yet 

10 rejected wisdom of Cassandra; the playful 
kindness and simple princess-life of happy 
Nausicaa ; the housewifely calm of that of 
Penelope, with its watch upon the sea ; the ever 
patient, fearless, hopelessly devoted piety of 

15 the sister and daughter, in Antigone ; the bow- 
ing down of Iphigenia, lamb-like and silent ; 
and finally, the expectation of the resurrection, 

9. Androniache. (an-drom' a ke.) Wife of Hector, 
the Trojan leader. 

10. Cassandra, (cas-san' dra.) Trojan prophetess, 
killed at Mycaena by Clytemnestra. 

12. Nausicaa. (na-sik' a-a.) Assisted Ulysses, 
when wrecked on her father's coast. 

13. Penelope, (pe-nel' o-pe.) Wife of Ulysses. A 
type of constancy. 

15. Antigone, (an-tig' o-ne.) Daughter of (Edipus 
and heroine of Sophocles' drama, Antigone. 

16. Iphigenia. (if-i je-ni' a.) Daughter of Aga- 
memnon, and sacrificed to Diana. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 125 

made clear to the soul of the Greeks in the 
return from her grave of that Alcestis, who, 
to save her husband, had passed calmly 
through the bitterness of death. 

Now I could multiply witness upon wit- s 
ness of this kind upon you if I had time. I 
would take Chaucer, and show you why he 
wrote a Legend of Good Women, but no 
Legend of Good Men. I would take Spenser, 
and show you how all his fairy knights areio 
sometimes deceived and sometimes van- 
quished ; but the soul of Una is never dark- 
ened, and the spear of Britomart is never 
broken. Nay, I could go back into the 
mythical teaching of the most ancient times, 15 
and show you how the great people, — by one 
of whose princesses it was appointed that the 

2. Alcestis. (al-ces' tis.) Wife of Admetus. Her- 
cules wrestled -with Death for her body. See picture 
of this struggle by Frederick Leighton. 

7. Chaucer. The father of English poetry. 

8. Legend of Good Women. One of Chaucer's finest 
poems in praise of noble women. Tennyson wrote a 
similar poem called The Dream of Fair Women. 

12. Una. The heroine of the first book of Spenser's 
Faery Queene. A type of purity. 

13. Britomart. Spenser's female knight, Chastity, 
also from Faery Queene. 

17. Princesses. Pharaoh's daughter. 



126 SESAME AND LILIES. 

lawgiver of all the earth should be educated, 
rather than by his own kindred, — how that 
great Egyptian people, wisest then of nations, 
gave to their Spirit of Wisdom the form of a 

5 woman, and into her hand, for a symbol, the 
weaver's shuttle ; and how the name and form 
of that spirit, adopted, believed, and obeyed 
by the Greeks, became that Athena of the 
olive-helm and cloudy shield, to faith in 

10 whom you owe, down to this date, whatever 
you hold most precious in art, in literature, 
or in types of national virtue. 

But I will not wander into this distant and 
mythical element ; I will only ask you to 

15 give its legitimate value to the testimony of 
these great poets and men of the world, — con- 
sistent as you see it is, on this head. I will 
ask you whether it can be supposed that these 
men, in the main work of their lives, are 

20 amusing themselves with a fictitious and idle 
view of the relations between man and woman ; 
nay, worse than fictitious or idle — for a 
thing may be imaginary, yet desirable, if it 

1. Lawgiver. Moses, but here taken to mean God. 

4. Spirit of Wisdom. Isis, who was to the 
Egyptians what Athena was to the Greeks. She was 
the patron of the arts and hence of weaving. 

14. Mythical. Relating to myths. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 127 

were possible ; but this, their ideal of woman, 
is, according to our common idea of the 
marriage relation, wholly undesirable. \The 
woman, we say, is not to guide, nor even to 
think for herself. The man is always to be s 
the wiser ; he is to be the thinker, the ruler, 
the superior in knowledge and discretion, as 
in power.) 

Is it not somewhat important to make up 
our minds on this matter? Are all these ^"^ 
great men mistaken, or are we? Are Shake- 
speare and JEschylus, Dante and Homer, 
merely dressing dolls for us ; or worse than 
dolls, unnatural visions, the realization of 
which, were it possible, would bring anarchy i* 
into all households and ruin into all affections ? 
Nay, if you can suppose this, take lastly the 
evidence of facts given by the human heart 
itself. In all Christian ages which have 
been remarkable for their purity of progress, 20 
there has been absolute yielding of obedient 
devotion, by the lover to his mistress. I 
say obedient^ — not merely enthusiastic and 
worshipping in imagination, but entirely 

12. JEschylus. One of the three greatest Greek 
dramatists. 

15. Anarchy. Disorganization, breaking up of rule 
or government. 



128 SESAME AND LILIES. 

subject, receiving from the beloved woman, 
however young, not only the encouragement, 
the praise, and the reward of all toil, but so 
far as any choice is open, or any question 
5 difficult of decision, the direction of all toil. 
That chivalry, — to the abuse and dishonor 
of which are attributable primarily whatever 
is cruel in war, unjust in peace, or corrupt 
and ignoble in domestic relations, and to the 

10 original purity and power of which we owe 
the defence alike of faith, of law, and of 
love, — that chivalry, I say, in its very first 
conception of honorable life, assumes the 
subjection of the young knight to the com- 

16 mand — should it even be the command in 
caprice — of his lady. It assumes this be- 
cause its masters know that the first and nec- 
essary impulse of every truly taught and 
knightly heart is this of blind service to its 

20 lady ; that where that true faith and captivity 
are not, all wayward and wicked passion 
must be ; and that in this rapturous obedi- 
e-nce to the single love of his youth, is the 
sanctification of all man's strength, and the 

28 continuance of all his purposes. And this, 
not because such obedience would be safe or 
12. Chivalry. Courtesy. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 129 

honorable, were it ever rended to the unwor- 
thy, but because it ought to be impossible for 
every noble youth — it is impossible for every 
one rightly trained — to love any one whose 
gentle counsel he cannot trust, or whose 5 
prayerful command he can hesitate to obey. 
I do not insist by any further argument on 
this ; for I think it should commend itself at 
once to your knowledge of what has been, 
and to your feelincr of what should be. Youio 
cannot think that the buckling on of the 
knight's armor by his lady's hand was a mere 
caprice of romantic fashion. It is the type 
of an eternal truth : that the soul's armor is 
never well set to the heart unless a woman's is 
hand has braced it ; and it is only when she 
braces it loosely that the honor of manhood 
fails. Know you not those lovely lines — I 
would they were learned by all youthful 
ladies of England, — 20 

" Ah, "wasteful woman ! — she who may 
On her sweet self set her own price, 
Knowing he cannot choose but pay, 
How has she cheapened Paradise ! 

11. Buckling on of the knighVs armor, etc. Refer- 
ring to the custom in the age of chivalry of the knight's 
lady buckling on his armor. 

21. Coventry Patmore's Angel in the House. 



130 SESAME AND LILIES. 

How given for nought her priceless gift, 
How spoiled the bread and spilled the wine, 
Which spent with due respective thrift. 
Had made brutes men, and men divine ! " * 

5 Thus much, then, respecting the relations 
of . lovers I believe you will accept. But 
what we too often doubt is the fitness of the 
continuance of such a relation throughout 
the whole human life. We think it right in 

10 the lover and mistress, not in the hus- 
band and wife. That is to say, we think 
that a reverent and tender duty is due to 
one whose affection we still doubt, and 
whose character we as yet do but partially 

16 and distantly discern ; and that this reverence 
and duty are to be withdrawn when the 
affection has become wholly and limitlessly 
our own, and the character has been sifted 
and tried that we fear not to entrust it with 

JO the happiness of our lives. Do you not see 
how ignoble this is, as well as how unreason- 
able? Do you not feel that marriage, when 
it is marriage at all, is only the seal which 
marks the vowed transition of temporary 

♦ Coventry Patmore. You cannot read him too 
often or too carefully ; as far as I know, he is the only 
living poet who always strengthens and purifies; the 
others sometimes darken, and nearly always depress 
and discourage. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 



131 



into untiring service, and of fitful into 
eternal love ? 

But how, you will ask, is the idea of 
this guiding function of the woman reconcil- 
able with a true wifely subjection? Simply ^ 
in that it is a guiding, not a determining, 
function. Let me try to show you briefly 
how these powers seem to be rightly dis- 
tinguishable. 

We are foolish,. and without excuse foolish, lo 
in speaking of the " superiority " of one sex 
to the other, as if they could be compared in 
similar things. Each has what the other 
has not; each completes the other, and is 
completed by the other. They are in noth-i6 
ing alike, and the happiness and perfection 
of both depends on each asking and receiving 
from the other what the other only can give. 

Now their separate characters are briefly 
these. The man's power is active, progres-20 
sive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, 
the creator, the discoverer, the defender. 
His intellect is for speculation and invention ; 
his energy for adventure, for war, and for 
conquest, wherever war is just, wherever 25 

23. Speculation. Mental view of anything in its 
different aspects and relations. 



132 SESAME AND LILIES. 

conquest necessary. But the woman's poweir 
is for rule, not for battle ; and her intellect 
is not for invention or creation, but for 
sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision. 

6 She sees the qualities of things, their claims, 
and their places. Her great function is 
praise ; she enters into no contest, but infal- 
libly adjudges the crown of contest. By her 
office and place, she is protected from all 

10 danger and temptation. The man, in his 
rough work in the open world, must encoun- 
ter all peril and trial, — to him therefore 
must be the failure, the offence, the inevitable 
error ; often he must be wounded or sub- 

i5dued; often misled; and always hardened. 
But he guards the woman from all this ; 
within his house as ruled by her, unless she 
herself has sought it, need enter no danger, 
no temptation, no cause of error or offence. 

20 This is the true nature of home — it is the 
place of peace ; the shelter, not only from all 
injury, but from all terror, doubt, and divi- 
sion. In so far as it is not this, it is not 
home ; so far as the anxieties of the outer 

25 life penetrate into it, and the inconsistently- 
minded, unknown, unloved, or hostile society 
of the outer world is allowed by either 



SESAME AND LILIES. 133 

husband or wife to cross the threshold, it 
ceases to be home ; it is then only a part of 
that outer world which you have roofed 
over and lighted fire in. But so far as it is 
a sacred place, a vestal temple, a temple of 6 
the hearth watched over by household gods, 
before whose faces none may come but those 
whom they can receive with love, — so far as 
it is this, and roof and fire are types only of 
a nobler shade and light, shade as of theio 
rock in a weary land, and light as of the 
Pharos in the stormy sea, — so far it vindi- 
cates the name and fulfils the praise of home. 
And wherever a true wife comes, this home 
is always round her. The stars only may be 15 
over her head, the glow-worm in the night- 
cold grass may be the only fire at her foot, 
but home is yet wherever she is ; and for a 
noble woman it stretches far round her, 
better than ceiled with cedar or painted with 20 
vermilion, shedding its quiet light far, for 
those who else were homeless. 

5. Vestal. Pure, chaste. 

6. Household gods. The Lares and Penates, the 
spirits of ancestors wc>rshipped at the hearth of every 
Roman home. 

12. Pharos. A lighthouse, so called from an island 
in the Bay of Alexandria where Ptolemy Philadelphus 
built a famous light-house. 



134 SESAME AND LILIES. 

This, then, I believe to be, — will you not 
admit it to be ? — the woman's true place and 
power. But do not you see that to fulfil 
this, she must — as far as one can use such 

8 terms of a human creature — be incapable of 
error? So far as she rules, all must be right, 
or nothing is. She must be enduringly, in- 
corruptibly good , instinctively , infallibly wise , 
— wise not for self-development, but for self- 

10 denunciation ; wise, not that she may set 
herself above her husband, but that she may 
never fail from his side ; wise, not with the 
narrowness of insolent and loveless pride, 
but with the passionate gentleness of an in- 

^5 finitely variable, because infinitely applicable, 
modesty of service — the true changefulness 
of woman. In that great sense, "La donna 
^ mobile," not "qual pium' al vento '' ; no, nor 
yet "Variable as the shade by the light quiv- 

20 ering aspen made " ; but variable as the lights 
manifold in fair and serene division that it 
may take the color of all that it falls upon, 
and exalt it. 

17. ''La donna e mobile." " Woman is changeable." 

18. " Qual pium al vento." "Like a feather in the 
■wind." 

19. " Variable as the shade" etc. From Scott's 
Marmion, Canto vi., stanza 30. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 135 

I have been trying, thus far, to show you 
what should be the place, and what the 
power, of woman. Now, secondly, we ask, 
What kind of education is to fit her for these ? 

And if you indeed think this a true con- 5 
ception of her office and dignity, it will not 
be difficult to trace the course of education 
which would fit her for the one and raise her 
to the other. 

The first of our duties to her — no thought- 10 
ful persons now doubt this — is to secure for 
her such physical training and exercise as may i 
confirm her health and perfect her beauty ; 
the highest refinement of that beauty being- 
unattainable without splendor of activity 15 
and of delicate strength. To perfect her 
beauty, I say, and increase its power ; it can- 
not be too powerful nor shed its sacred light 
too far; only remember that all physical 
freedom is vain to produce beauty without a 20 
corresponding freedom of heart. There are 
two passages of that poet, who is distin- 
guished, it seems to me, from all others, — 
not by power but by exquisite rz^^^ness, — 
which point you to the source, and describe 25 
to you in a few syllables, the completion of 
22. Poet. Wordsworth. 



136 SESAME AND LILIES. 

womanly beauty. I will read the introduc- 
tory stanzas, but the last is the one I wish 
you specially to notice : 

" Three years she grew in sun and shower, 
6 Then Nature said, ' A lovelier flower 

On earth was never sown. 
This child I to myself will take ; - 
She shall be mine, and I will make 
A lady of my own. 

10 *• ' Myself will to my darling be 

Both law and impulse ; and with me 
The girl, in rock and plain, 
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, 
Shall feel an overseeing power, 
To kindle or restrain. 

15 

'' ' The floating clouds their state shall lend 
To her, for her the willow bend ; 
Nor shall she fail to see 
Even in the motions of the storm, 
20 Grace that shall mould the maiden's form 

By silent sympathy. 

" ♦ And vital feelings of delight 

Shall rear her form to stately height, 

Her virgin bosom sv/ell. 
Such thoughts to Lucy I will give, 
While she and I together live. 

Here in this happy dell.'"* 



25 



* Observe, it is Nature who is speaking throughout, 
and who says, "While she and I together live." 

4. «' Three years she grew" etc. From Words- 
worth's Poems of the Imagination. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 137 



*' Fi^aZ feeling of delight," observe. There 
are deadly feelings of delight ; but the natural 
ones are vital, necessary to very life. 

And they must be feelings of delight, if they 
are to be vital. Do not think you can makes 
a girl lovely, if you do not make her happy. 
There is not one restraint you put on a 
good girl's nature, there is not one check you 
give to her instincts of affection or of effort, 
which will not be indelibly written on herio 
features, with a hardness which is all the 
more painful because it takes away the bright- 
ness from the eyes of innocence, and the 
charm from the brow of virtue. 

This for the means ; now note the end. is 
Take from the same poet, in two lines, a per- 
fect description of womanly beauty, — 

" A countenance in which did meet 
Sweet records, promises as sweet." 

The perfect loveliness of a woman's coun-20 
tenance can only consist in that majestic peace 
which is founded in the memory of happy 
and useful years, full of sweet records ; and 
from the joining of this with that yet more 
majestic childishness, which is still full of 25 
change and promise, — opening always — 
modest at once, and bright, with hope of bet- 



138 SESAME AND LILIES. 

ter things to be won, and to be bestowed. 
There is no old age where there is still that 
promise. 
\p'x Thus, then, you have first to mould her 
^ 6 physical frame, and then, as the strength she 
gains will permit you, to fill and temper her 
mind with all knowledo^e and thouo^hts which 
tend to confirm its natural instincts of justice, 
and refine its natural tact of love. 

10 All such knowledge should be given her as 
may enable her to understand, and even to 
aid, the work of men ; and yet it should be 
given, not as knowledge, — not as if it were, 
or could be, for her an object to know, but 

16 only to feel, and to judge. It is of no moment, 
as a matter of pride and perfectness in her- 
self, whether she knows many languages or 
one ; but it is of the utmost, that she should 
be able to show kindness to a stranger, and 

20 to understand the sweetness of a stranger's 
tongue. It is of no moment to her own worth 
or dignity that she should be acquainted with 
this science or that ; but it is of the highest 
that she should be trained in habits of accu- 

26 rate thought ; that she should understand the 

meaning, the inevitableness, and the loveli- 

26. Inevitableness. The state of being unavoidable. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 139 

ness of natural laws ; and follow at least some 
one path of scientific attainment as far as to 
the threshold of that bitter Valley of Humilia- 
tion, into which only the wisest and bravest 
of men can descend, owning themselves for- ^ 
ever children, gathering pebbles on a bound- 
less shore. It is of little consequence how 
many positions of cities she knows, or how 
many dates of events, or names of celebrated 
persons — it is not the object of education to lo 
turn the woman into fa dictionary ; but it is 
deeply necessary that she should be taught 
to enter with her whole personality into the 
history she reads ; to picture the passages of 
it vitally in her own bright imagination ; to is 
apprehend, with her fine instincts, the pathetic 
circumstances and dramatic relations, which 
the historian too often only eclipses by his 
reasoning, and disconnects by his arrange- 
ment ; it is for her to trace the hidden equities 20 
of Divine reward, and catch sight, through 
the darkness, of the fateful threads of woven 
fire that connect error with retribution. But 

3. Valley of Humiliation. Allegorical expression 
for a state of discouragement. 

20. Equities. Natural justice or rights. 

22. Fateful. Significant of fate, ominous. 



140 SESAME AND LILIES. 

chiefly of all, she is to be taught to extend 
the limits of her sympathy with respect to 
that history which is being forever determined 
as the moments pass in which she draws her 

6 peaceful breath, and to the contemporary 
calamity, which, were it but rightly mourned 
by her, would recur no more hereafter. She 
is to exercise herself in imagining what would 
be the efiects upon her mind and conduct, if 

10 she were daily brought into the presence of 
the suffering which is not the less real because 
shut from her sight. She is to be taught 
somewhat to understand the nothingness of 
the proportion which that little world in 

15 which she lives and loves, bears to the world 
in which God lives and loves ; and solemnly 
she is to be taught to strive that her thoughts 
of piety may not be feeble in proportion to 
the number they embrace, nor her prayer 

20 more languid than it is for the momentary 
relief from pain of her husband or her child, 
when it is uttered for the multitudes of those 
who have none to love them, and is " for all 
who are desolate and oppressed." 

26 If there were to be any difierence between 

a girl's education and a boy's, I should say 

5. Contemporary. Occurring or existing at the 
same time. 



1 



SESAME AND LILIES. 141 

that of the two the girl should be earlier led, 
as her intellect ripens faster, into deep and 
serious subjects, and that her range of liter- 
ature should be, not more, but less frivolous, 
— calculated to add the qualities of patience g 
and seriousness to her natural poignancy of 
thought and quickness of wit, and also to 
keep her in a lofty and pure element of 
thought. I enter not now into any question 
of choice of books ; only let us be sure that^Q 
her books are not heaped up in her lap as 
they fall out of the package of the circulating 
library, wet with the last and lightest spray 
of the fountain of folly. 

' Or even of the fountain of wit ; for with jg 
respect to the sore temptation of novel read- 
ing, it is not the badness of a novel that we 
should dread so much as its overwrought 
interest. The weakest romance is not so 
stupefying as the lower forms of religious 20 
exciting literature, and the worst romance is 
not so corrupting as false history, false phil- 
osophy, or false political essays. But the 
best romance becomes dangerous, if by its 
excitement it renders the ordinary course of 25 
life uninteresting, and increases the morbid 

6. Poignancy. State of being poignant, piercing, 
sharp. 



142 SESAME AND LILIES. 

thirst for useless acquaintance with scenes 
in which we shall never be called upon to 
act. 
■;1 speak, therefore, of good novels only, 

Sand our modern literature is particularly 
rich in types of such. Well read, indeed, 
these books have serious use, being nothing 
less than treatises on moral anatomy and 
chemistry ; studies of human nature in the 

10 elements of it. But I attach little weight to 
this function ; they are hardly ever read with 
earnestness enough to permit them to fulfil 
it. The utmost they usually do is to enlarge 
somewhat the charity of a kind reader, or 

15 the bitterness of a malicious one ; for each 
will gather from the novel food for har own 
disposition. Those who are naturally proud 
and envious will learn from Thackeray to 
despise humanity ; those who are naturally 

20 gentle, to pity it; those who are naturally 
shallow, to laugh at it. So, also, there 
might be a serviceable power in novels to 
bring before us in vividness a human truth 
which we had before but dimly conceived ; 

8. Moral anatomy and chemistry. Form and sub- 
stance of moral or ethical life. 

18. Thackeray. England's greatest satirical novel- 
ist C1811-1863V 



SESAME AND LILIES. 143 

but the temptation to picturesqueness of 
statement is so great that often the best 
writers of fiction cannot resist it ; and our 
views are rendered so violent and one-sided 

fthat their vitality is rather a harm than good. * 
'i Without, however, venturing here on any 
attempt at decision how much novel reading 
should be allowed, let me at least clearly 
assert this, that whether novels or poetry or 
history be read, they should be chosen, noti** 
for their freedom from evil, but for their pos- 
session of good. The chance and scattered 
evil that may here and there haunt, or hide 
itself in, a powerful book, never does any 
harm to a noble girl ; but the emptiness of i« 
an author oppresses her, and his amiable 
folly degrades her. And if she can have 
access to a good library of old and classical 
books, there need be no choosing at all. 
Keep the modern magazine and novel out of 20 
your girl's way ; turn her loose into the old 
library every day, and let her alone. She 
will find what is good for her; you cannot; 
for there is just this difi'erence between the 
making of the girl's character and a boy's : 25 
you may chisel a boy into shape, as you 
would a rock, or hammer him into it, if he 



144 SESAME AND LILIES. 

be of a better kind, as you would a piece of 
bronze ; but you cannot hammer a girl into 
anything. She grows as a flower does, — 
she will wither without sun ; she will decay 

sin her sheath as a narcissus will if you do 
not give her air enough ; she may fall and 
defile her head in dust if you leave her with- 
out help at some moments of her life, but 
you cannot fetter her ; she must take her 

10 own fair form and way if she take any, and 
in mind as in body, must have always — 

" Her household motions light and free, 
And steps of virgin liberty." 

Let her loose in the library, I say, as you do 
15 a fawn in the field. It knows the bad weeds 
twenty times better than you, and the good 
ones too, and will eat some bitter and prickly 
ones good for it which you had not the slight- 
est thought would have been so. 
20 Then, in art, keep the finest models before 
her, and let her practise ; in all accomplish- 
ments be accurate and thorough, so as to 

5. Narcissus. The general name for flowers like 
the daffodil and jonquil. 

7. Defile. To soil. Shakespeare uses file in the 
same sense. 

12 , " Her motions" etc. From Wordsworth's Poems 
of the Imagination. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 145 

enable her to understand more than she 
accomplishes. I say the finest models — that 
is to sa}^ the truest, simplest, usefulest. 
Note those epithets ; they will range through 
all the arts. Try them in music, where you * 
might think them the least applicable. I say 
the truest, that in which the notes most closely 
and faithfully express the meaning of the 
words, or the character of intended emotion ; 
again, the simplest, that in which the mean-io 
ing and melody are attained with the fewest 
and most significant notes possible ; and 
finally, the usefulest, that music which makes 
the best words most beautiful, which enchants 
them in our memories each with its own glory i5 
of sound, and which applies them closest to 
the heart at the moment we need them. 
Ac And not only in the material and in the 
course, but yet more earnestly in the spirit 
of it, let a girl's education be as serious as a 20 
boy's. You bring up your girls as if they 
were meant for sideboard ornaments, and then 
complain of their frivolity. Give them the 
same advantages that you give their brothers ; 
appeal to the same grand instincts of virtue 25 

4. Epithets. Adjectives expressing some quality, 
attribute or relation. 



146 SESAME AND LILIES. 

in them ; teach ihem^ also, that courage and 
truth are the pillars of their being. Do you 
think that they would not answer that appeal, 
brave and true as they are even now, when 

3 you know that there is hardly a girl's school 
in this Christian kingdom where the chil- 
dren's courage or sincerity would be thought 
of half so much importance as their way of 
coming in at a door ; and when the whole 

10 system of society, as respects the mode of 
establishing them in life, is one rotten plague 
of cowardice and imposture — cowardice, in 
not daring to let them live or love except as 
their neighbors choose ; and imposture, in 

15 bringing, for the purposes of our own pride, 
the full glow of the world's worst vanity upon 
a girl's eyes, at the very period when the 
whole happiness of her future existence 
depends upon her remaining undazzled? 

20 And give them, lastly, not only noble 
teachings, but noble teachers. There is one 
more help which she cannot do without, — 
one which alone has sometimes done more 
than all other influences besides, — the help 

2. Pillars. Supporters or mainstays. 

12. Imposture. Deception practiced under false 
character. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 147 

of wild and fair Nature. Hear this of the 
education of Joan of Arc : — 

" The education of this poor girl was mean accord- 
ing to the present standard ; was ineffably grand accord- 
ing to a purer philosophic standard ; and only not good 5 
for our age because for us it would be unattainable. 

' ' Next after her spiritual advantages she owed most 
to the advantages of her situation. The fountain of 
Domremy was on the brink of a boundless forest ; and 
it was haunted to that degree by fairies that the parish jq 
priest (^cure) was obliged to read mass there once a 
year in order to keep them in decent bounds. . . . 

"But the forests of Domremy — those were the 
glories of the land; for in them abode mysterious 
powers and ancient secrets that towered into tragic 15 
strength. Abbeys there were, and abbey windows — 
• like Moorish temples of the Hindoos' — that exercised 
even princely power both in Touraine and in the 
German Diets. These had their sweet bells that pierced 
the forests for many a league at matins or vespers, and 20 
each its own dreamy legend. Few enough, and scat- 

2. Joan of Arc. A peasant girl of France who led 
the French armies to victory in the second period of 
the Hundred Years' War between England and France. 
She succeeded in having the Dauphin, Charles VII., 
crowned. She was burned by the English as a sorcer- 
ess in 1431. 

9. Domremy. A French village, known as the birth- 
place of Joan of Arc. 

18. Touraine. An old province of France of which 
Tours was the capital 

19. Diets. Legislative assemblies. 

20. Matins. Morning prayers. 
20. Vespers. Evening prayers. 



148 SESAME AND LILIES. 

tered enough, were these abbeys, so as in no degree to 
disturb the deep solitude of the region; yet many 
enough to spread a network or awning of Christian 
sanctity over what else might have seemed a heathen 
5 wilderness."* 

Now, you cannot, indeed, have here in 
England woods eighteen miles deep to the 
centre ; but you can, perhaps, keep a fairy 
or two for your children yet if you wish to 

10 keep them. But do you wish it? Suppose 
you had each, at the back of your houses, a 
garden large enough for your children to 
play in, with just as much lawn as would 
give them room to run, — no more, — and 

16 that you could not change your abode ; but 
that, if you chose, you could double your 
income or quadruple it by digging a coal 
shaft in the middle of the lawn, and turning 
the flower-beds into heaps of coke. Would 

20 you do it? I hope not. I can tell you you 
would be wrong if you did, though it gave 
you income sixty-fold instead of four-fold. 

Yet this is what you are doing with all 
England. The whole country is but a little 
garden, not more than enough for your chik 
dren to run on the lawns of if you would let 

* "Joan of Arc : in reference to M. Michelet's ' His- 
tory of France.'" (De Quincey's Works, vol. iii., p. 217.) 



SESAME AND LILIES. 149 

them all run there. And this little garden 
you will turn into furnace ground, and fill 
with heaps of cinders if you can ; and those 
children of yours, not you, will suffer for it. 
For the fairies will not be all banished ; there 5 
are fiiiries of the furnace as of the wood, and 
their first gift seems to be " sharp arrows of 
the mighty " ; but their last gifts are " coals 
of juniper." 

And yet I cannot — though there is no 10 
"^ part of my subject that I feel more — press 
this upon you ; for we made so little use of 
the power of Nature while we had it that we 
shall hardly feel what we have lost. Just 
on the other side of the Mersey you have is 
your Snowdon and your Menai Straits and 
that mighty granite rock beyond the moors 
of Anglesea, splendid in its heathery crest, 
and foot planted in the deep sea, once 
thought of as sacred, — a diviup. promontory, 20 
looking westward ; the Holyhead, or Head- 

7. '^ Sharp arrows," Qtc. Psalms cxx., 4. Sharp 
arrows of the mighty with c^als of juniper. 

15. Mersey. Principal river in the west of England. 

16, Snowdon. The highest mountain in Wales. 

16. Menai. fmen' 1.) Straits separating the island 
of Anglesea from Wales. 

21. Holyhead. Northwestern" point of island of 
Anglesea, northwest of Wales. 



150 SESAME AND LILIES. 

land, still not without awe when its red light 
glares first through storm. These are the 
hills, and these the bays and blue inlets which, 
among the Greeks, would have been always 

5 loved, always fateful in influence on the 
national mind. That Snowdon is your Par- 
nassus, but where are its Muses? That 
Holyhead mountain is your island of iSgina ; 
but where is its Temple to Minerva ? 

^° Shall I read you what the Christian Min- 
erva had achieved under the shadow of our 
Parnassus up to the year 1848? Here is a 
little account of a Welsh school, from page 
261 of the Report on Wales, published by 

"the Committee of Council on Education. 
This is a school close to a town containing 
5,000 persons : — 

'* I then called up a larger class, most of whom had 
recently come to the school. Three girls repeatedly 
20 declared they had never heard of Christ, and two 
that they had never heard of God. Two out of six 
thought Christ was on earth now [they might have had 
a worse thought perhaps], three knew nothing about 

6. Parnassus. Among the Greeks, the home of the 
Muses. 

7. Muses. The nine goddesses who presided over 
song, different kinds of poetry, the arts and sciences. 

8. JEgina. A small island southwest of Athens 
formerly famous for Its temples. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 151 

the Crucifixion. Four out of seven did not know the 
names of the months nor the number of days in a year. 
They had no notion of addition ; beyond two and two 
or three and three their minds were perfect blanks." 

O ye women of England ! from the Princess 
of that Wales to the simplest of you, do not 
think your own children can be brought into 
their true fold of rest while these are scat- 
tered on the hills as sheep having no shep- 
herd. And do not think your daughters can^^ 
be trained to the truth of their own human 
beauty while the pleasant places which God 
made at once for their school-room and their 
play-ground lie desolate and defiled. You 
cannot baptize them rightly in those inch-deep ^^ 
fonts of yours unless you baptize them also 
in the sweet waters which the great Lawgiver 
strikes forth forever from the rocks of your 
native land, — waters which a Pagan would 
have worshipped in their purity, and you^Q 
worship only with pollution. You cannot 
lead your children faithfully to those narrow 
axe-hewn church-altars of yours while the 

5. Princess of Wales, The woman of the highest 
rank in England next to the Queen. 

17. Great Lawgiver. God. It was Moses who 
struck the rock and the water gushed from it to refresh 
the thirsting Israelites. 



152 SESAME AND LILIES. 

dark azure altars in heaven — the mountains 
that sustain your island throne, mountains on 
which a Pagan would have seen the powers 
of heaven rest in every wreathed cloud — 

6 remain for you without inscription ; altars 
built, not to, but by, an Unknown God. 

Thus far, then, of the nature, thus far of 
the teaching, of woman, and thus of her house- 
hold office and queenliness. We come now 

10 to our last, our widest question, — What is 

her queenly office with respect to the State ? 

Generally, we are under an impression that 

a man's duties are public, and a woman's 

private. But this is not altogether so. A 

15 man has a personal work or duty, relating to 
his own home, and a public work or duty, 
which is the expansion of the other, relating 
to the State. So a woman has a personal 
work or duty, relating to her own home, and 

20 a public work and duty, which is also the 
expansion of that. 

Now, the man's work for his own home is, 
as has been said, to secure its maintenance, 
progress, and defence ; the woman's to secure 

26 its order, comfort, and loveliness. 

Expand both these functions. The man's 
6. Unknown God. Acts xvii., 23. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 153 

duty, as a member of a commonwealth, is to 
assist in the maintenance, in the advance, in 
the defence of the State. The woman's duty, 
as a member of the commonwealth, is to assist 
in the ordering, in the comforting, and in & 
the beautiful adornment of the State. 

What the man is at his own gate, defend- 
ing it, if need be, against insult and spoil, 
that, also, not in a less, but in a more de- 
voted measure, he is to be at the gate ofio 
his country, leaving his home, if need be, 
even to the spoiler, to do his more incum- 
bent work there. 

And, in like manner, what the woman is 
to be within her gates, as the centre of order, is 
the balm of distress, and the mirror of beauty, 
that she is also to be without her gates, 
where order is more difficult, distress more 
imminent, loveliness more rare. 

And as witiiin the human heart there is al-20 
ways set an instinct for all its real duties, — 
an instinct which you cannot quench, but 
only warp and corrupt if you withdraw it 

1. Commonwealth. A state; a free and popular 
government. 

12. Incumbent. Resting upon, perhaps here better 
rendered pressing. 

19. Imminent. Near at hand. 



154 SESAME AND LILIES. 

from its true purpose ; as there is the intense 
instinct of love, which rightly disciplined 
maintains all the sanctities of life, and mis- 
directed undermines them, and must do either 

5 the one or the other, so there is in the hu- 
man heart an inextinguishable instinct, — the 
love of power, which rightly directed main- 
tains all the majesty of law and life, and 
misdirected wrecks them. 

2» Deep rooted in the innermost life of the 

LL\ heart of man, and of the heart of woman, 

God set it there, and God keeps it there. 

Vainly, as falsely, you blame or rebuke the 

desire of power ! For Heaven's sake, and 

16 for Man's sake, desire it all you can. But 
what power? That is all the question. Power 
to destroy, — the lion's limb, and the drag- 
on's breath? Not so. Power to heal, to 
redeem, to guide, and to guard; power of 

20 the sceptre and shield ; the power of the 
royal hand that heals in touching, that binds 
the fiend, and looses the captive ; the throne 
that is founded on the rock of justice, and 
descended from only by the steps of mercy. 

26 Will you not covet such power as this, and 
seek such throne as this, and be no more 
housewives, but queens? 



SESAME AND LILIES. 155 

(y^'. It is now long since the women of Eng- 
land, arrogated, universally, a title which 
once belonged to nobility only ; and having 
once been in the habit of accepting the 
simple title of "gentlewoman," as correspond- 5 
ent to that of "gentleman," insisted on the 
privilege of assuming the title of "lady,"* 
which properly corresponds only to the title 
of "lord." 

I do not blame them for this, but only for 10 
their narrow motive in this. I would have 
them desire and claim the title of " lady " pro- 
vided they claim not merely the title, but the 
oflSce and duty signified by it. " Lady " 
means "bread-giver" or "loaf-giver," and is 
Mord "means "maintainer of laws;" and 
both titles have reference, not to the law 
which is maintained in the house, nor to the 
bread which is given to the household, but 

*I wish there were a true order of chivalry instituted 
for our English youth of certain ranks, in which both 
boy and girl should receive, at a given age, their knight- 
hood and ladyhood by true title ; attainable only by 
certain probation and trial both of character and ac- 
complishment ; and to be forfeited on conviction by 
their peers of any dishonorable act. Such an institu- 
tion would be entirely, and with all noble results, pos- 
sible in a nation which loved honor. That it would 
not be possible among us is not to the discredit of the 
scheme. 

2. Arrogated. Claimed as their own. 



156 SESAME AND LILIES. 

to law maintained for the multitude, and to 
bread broken among the multitude. So that 
a Lord has legal claim only to his title in so 
far as he is the maintainer of the justice of the 
5 Lord of lords ; and a Lady has legal claim to 
her title only so far as she communicates that 
help to the poor representatives of her Mas- 
ter, which women once, ministering to Him 
of their substance, were permitted to extend 
10 to that Master Himself; and when she is 
known, as He Himself once was, in breaking 
of bread . 
/, ' And this beneficent and legal dominion, 
^-^this power of the dominus, or House-Lord, 
16 and of the domina^ or House-Lady, is great 
and venerable, not in the number of those 
through whom it has lineally descended, but 
in the number of those whom it grasps within 
its sway ; it is always regarded with reverent 
20 worship wherever its dynasty is founded on 
its duty, and its ambition correlative with 
its beneficence. Your fancy is pleased with 
the thought of being noble ladies, with a train 
of vassals ? Be it so ; you cannot be too 

20. Dynasty. A succession of kings of the same 
family. Lordship. 

24. Vassals. Those who hold land of a superior 
and who vow fidelity and homage in return. Servants. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 157 

noble, and your train cannot be too great ; 
but see to it that your train is of vassals whom 
you serve and feed, not merely of slaves who 
serve and feed you ; and that the multitude 
which obeys you is of those whom you have s 
comforted, not oppressed, — whom you have 
redeemed, and led into captivity. 

And this, which is true of the lower or 
household dominion, is equally true of the 
queenly dominion ; that highest dignity is lo 
open to you if you will also accept that high- 
est duty. Rex et regina — roi et reine — 
" right-doers ;" they diifer but from the Lady 
and Lord in that their power is supreme 
over the mind as over the person ; that they is 
not only feed and clothe, but direct and 
teach. And whether consciously or not you 
must be in many a heart enthroned. There 
is' no putting by that crown ; queens you 
must always be, — queens to your lovers; 20 
queens to your husbands and your sons ; 
queens of higher mystery to the world beyond, 
which bows itself, and will forever bow, 
before the myrtle crown and the stainless 

12. Bex fit regina. King and queen. From rego, to 
direct straight. 

12. Boi et reine. King and queen. French from 
Latin rex et i-egina. 



ibS SESAME AND LILIES. 



sceptre of womanhood. But, alas ! you are 
too often idle and careless queens, grasping 
at majesty in the least things, while you 
abdicate it in the greatest ; and leaving mis- 

5 rule and violence to work their will among 
men, in defiance of the power which, holding 
straight in gift from the Prince of all Peace, 
the wicked among you betray, and the good 
forget. 

10 "Prince of Peace." Note that name. 
When kings rule in that name, and nobles, 
and the judges of the earth, they also in their 
narrow place and mortal measure receive the 
power of it. There are no other rulers than 

15 they ; other rule than theirs is but misrule ; 
they who govern verily " Dei gratia" are all 
princes, yes, or princesses, of peace. There 
IE not^a war in the world, no, nor an injustice, 
but you women are answerable for it ; not in 

20 that you have provoked, but in that you 
have not hindered. Men by their nature are 
prone to fight ; they will fight for any cause, 
or for none. It is for you to choose their 
cause for them, and to forbid them when 

25 there is no cause. There is no suffering, no 
injustice, no misery in the earth, but the 
16. Dei gratid,. By the grace of God. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 159 

guilt of it lies with you. Men can bear the 
sight of it, but you should not be able to bear 
it. Men may tread it down without sym- 
pathy, in their own struggle ; but men are 
feeble in sympathy and contracted in hope : 5 
it is you only who can feel the depths 
of pain, and conceive the way of its healing. 
Instead of trying to do this, you turn away 
from it ; you shut * yourselves within your 
park walls and garden gates ; and you are w 
content to know that there is beyond them 
a whole world in wilderness — a world of 
secrets which you dare not penetrate, and 
of suffering which you dare not con- 
ceive. 16 

I tell you that this is to me quite the most 
amazing among the phenomena of humanity. 
I am surprised at no depths to which, when 
once warped from its honor, that humanity 
can be degraded. I do not wonder at the 20 
miser's death, with his hands, as they relax, 
dropping gold. I do not wonder at the sen- 
sualist's life, with the shroud wrapped about 
his feet. I do not wonder at the single- 
handed murder of a single victim, done by.^^ 
the assassin in the darkness of the railway or 
reed-shadow of the marsh. I do not even 



160 SESAME AND LILIES. 

wonder at the myriad-handed murder of mul- 
titudes, done boastfully in the daylight by 
the frenzy of nations, and the immeasurable, 
unimaginable guilt, heaped up from hell to 
** heaven, of their priests and kings. But this 
is wonderful to me — -oh, how wonderful ! — 
to see the tender and delicate woman among 
you, with her child at her breast, and a power, 
if she would wield it, over it and over its 
^^ father, purer than the air of heaven and 
stronger than the seas of earth, — nay, a 
maojnitude of blessino^ which her husband 
would not part with for all that earth itself, 
though it were made of one entire and per- 
is feet chrysolite, — to see her abdicate this 
majesty to play at precedence with her next- 
door neighbor ! This is wonderful — oh, 
wonderful ! — to see her with every innocent 
feeling fresh within her, go out in the morn- 
2oing into her garden to play with the fringes 
of its guarded flowers, and lift their heads 

1. 3Iifriad-handed. As with a myriad, countless 
number of hands. 

3. Frenzy. Violent agitation, rage. 

15. Chrysolite. A yellowish green gem. 

15. Abdicate. To relinquish a throne or other high 
dignity. 

16. Precedence. The act of going before, rank. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 161 

<rhen they are drooping, with her happy 
3mile upon her face and no cloud upon her 
brow, because there is a little wall around 
her place of peace ; and yet she knows in her 
heart, if she would only look for its knowl- 6 
ed^e, that outside of that little rose-covered ^ 
wall, the wild grass, to the horizon, is torn 
up, by the agony of men, and beat level by 
the drift of their life-blood. 

Have you ever considered what a deepio 
under-meaning there lies, or at least may be 
read, if we choose, in our custom of strewing 
flowers before those whom we think most 
happy ? Do you suppose it is merely to de- 
ceive them into the hope that happiness is 15 
always to fall thus in showers at their feet ; 
that wherever they pass they will tread on 
herbs of sweet scent, and that the rough 
ground will be made smooth for them by 
depth of roses? So surely as they believe 20 
that, they will have, instead, to walk on bit- 
ter herbs and thorns ; and the only softness 
to their feet will be of snow. But it is not 
thus intended they should believe ; there is 
a better meaning in that old custom. The 25 
path of a good woman is indeed strewn with 
flowers ; but they rise behind her steps, not 



162 SESAME AND LILIES. 

before them. "Her feet have touched the 

meadows, and left the daisies rosy." 

6j (k You think that only a lover's fancy — false 

and vain ! How if it could be true ? You 

5 think this also, perhaps, only a poet's fancy — 

" Even the light harebell raised its head 
Elastic from her airy tread." 

But it is little to say of a woman that she 
only does not destroy where she passes. 

10 She should revive; the harebells should 
bloom, not stoop, as she passes. You think 
I am rushing into wild hyperbole ? Pardon 
me, not a whit; I mean what I say in calm 
English, spoken in resolute truth. You 

15 have heard it said (and I believe there is 
more than fancy even in that saying, but let 
it pass for a fanciful one) that flowers only 
flourish rightly in the garden of some one 

1. " Her feet " etc. Tennyson's Maud. 

2. Bosy. The English daisy has a strong tint of 
rose color in its under petals. When slightly disturbed 
the color is evident. Burns says, " Wee crimson-tipped 
flower," of this flower. 

6. Harebell. Delicate blue flower poised on an 
almost threadlike stem, common in the north of 
England and in Scotland. Light indeed must have been 
the tread of one after whom " the harebell raised its 
head ! " Passage from Scott's Lady of the Lake. 

12. Hyperbole. A figure of v'<peech in which the ex- 
pression is evidently an exaggeration. 



SESAME AND LILIES, 



163 



who loves them. I know you would like 
that to be true ; you would think it a pleas- 
ant magic if you could flush your flowers 
into brighter bloom by a kind look upon 
them ; nay, more, if your look had the power, & 
not only to cheer, but to guard ; if you could 
bid the black blight turn away, and the knot- 
ted caterpillar spare ; if you could bid the 
dew fall upon them in the drought, and say 
to the south wind, in frost, "Come, thouio 
south, and breathe upon my garden, that the 
spices of it may flow out." This you would 
think a great thing. And do you think it 
not a greater thing that all this (and how 
much more than this !) you can do for fairer is 
flowers than these ; flowers that could bless 
you for having blessed them, and will love 
you for having loved them ; flowers that have 
thoughts like yours and lives like yours, and 
which, once saved, you save forever? Is 20 
this only a little power? Far among the 
moorlands and the rocks, far in the darkness 
of the terrible streets, these feeble florets are 
lying, with all their fresh leaves torn and 
their stems broken. Will you never go down 25 
to them nor set them in order in their little 
fragrant beds, nor fence them, in their trem- 



164 SESAME AND LILIES, 

bling, from the fierce wind? Shall morning 
follow morning for you, but not for them ; 
and the dawn rise to watch, far away, those 
frantic dances of death, but no dawn rise to 

6 breathe upon these living banks of wild vio- 
let and woodbine and rose ; nor call to you 
through your casement, — call (not giving 
you the name of the English poet's lady, but 
the name of Dante's great Matilda, who, on 

10 the edge of happy Lethe, stood, wreathing 
flowers with flowers), saying, — 

" Come into the garden, Maud, 
For the black bat night has flown. 
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad, 
15 And the musk of the roses blown"? 

Will you not go down among them, — 
among those sweet living things, whose new 
courage, sprung from the earth with the deep 
color of heaven upon it, is starting up in 
20 strength of goodly spire; and whose purity, 
washed from the dust, is opening, bud by 

4. Dances of death. Here, the pleasures of vice. 

9. Matilda. The Countess Matilda whose castle 
at Canossa was the scene of Hildebrand's humili- 
ation of Henry of Germany. The Pope Hildebrand 
(Gregory VII.) was under the protection of Matilda. 

10. Lethe. A river of Hades, a drink of whose 
water caused forgetfulness of the past. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 165 

bud, into the flower of promise? And still 
they turn to you, and for you "The Larkspur 
listens — I hear, I hear ! And the Lily whis- 
pers — I wait." 

Did you notice that I missed two lines j 
when I read you that first stanza, and think 
that I had forgotten them ? Hear them 
now : 

" Come into the garden, Maud, 
For the black bat night has flow j^ u 

Come into the garden, Maud, 
I am here at the gate, alone." 

Who is it, think you, who stands at the 
gate of this sweeter garden alone, waiting 
for you ? Did you ever hear, not of a Maud, ^^ 
but a Madeline, who went down to her gar- 
den in the dawn and found One waiting at 
the gate whom she supposed to be the gar- 
dener? Have you not sought Him often; 
sought Him in vain all through the night ; 20 
sought Him in vain at the gate of that old 
garden where the fiery sword is set? He is 
never there ; but at the gate of this garden 
He is waiting always — waiting to take your 

2. " The Larkspur" etc. From Tennyson's Maud. 

16. Madeline. Same as Magdalene. See John 
XX., 15. 

22. Fiery sword. Genesis iii., 24. 



166 SESAME AND LILIES. 

hand — ready to go down to see the fruits of 
the valley, to see whether the vine has flour- 
ished and the pomegranate budded. There 
you shall see with Him the little tendrils of 

^ the vines that His hand is guiding ; there you 
shall see the pomegranate springing where 
his hand cast the sanguine seed ; more, you 
shall see the troops of the angel keepers that, 
with their wings, wave away the hungry 

^® birds from the pathsides where He has sown, 
and call to each other between the vineyard 
rows, "Take us the foxes, the little foxes, 
that spoil the vines, for our vines have ten- 
der grapes." Oh, you queens, you queens ! 

15 among the hills and happy greenwood of 
this land of yours, shall the foxes have holes, 
and the birds of the air have nests ; and in 
your cities shall the stones cry out against 
you, that they are the only pillows where 

20 the Son of Man can lay His head ? 

7. Sanguine seed. The seeds of the pomegranate 
are bright red in color. 

12. Foxes. Song of Solomon ii., 15. 



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